“Good for a Girl” by Laura Fleshman is like a friendly chat over a cup of coffee, mixing personal stories with a candid look at the challenges that female athletes often face. It talks about relatable issues, from how athletes view their own bodies to the everyday struggles with eating habits, and the undeniable presence of unfair treatment. If you’re someone who loves sports, especially track and field, you’re in for a treat with this book. Fleshman shows us just how tough the sports world can be, but she’s also a cheerleader for fair play. As you flip through these pages, you’ll join her in the rallying cry for a level playing field in sports.
Summary
- There are no sex-based performance advantages in sport among children. But at about 12 and a half years of age, as puberty hormones enact changes on female and male bodies differently, two distinct performance paths emerge. While both groups show improvement with training over time on average, the rate of improvement differs dramatically by sex. Then hormones of male puberty create an environment for advantageous muscoloskeletal changes, increased red blood cell mass, and lower fat mass. The performance gap between males and females widens with each passing year until around age 20, at which point it stabilizes with the male advantage ranging from 10-50%, depending on the sport. This pattern consistent even when controlling for training, nutrition, funding, and medical care.
- Eating disorders, self-harm, self-sabotage behaviors look like personal choices, but they are choices made within a particular sporting environment that women had to fight to get access to but did not get a chance to create.
- for males, ages 18 through 22 are the years of peak testosterone, maximum training capacity, and robust recovery power. It makes sense that a sports industry built for 18-22 year-old male bodies would have a body ideal of leanness—and an expected trajectory of steady performance improvement.
- The body of 18-22 year-old female is investing in peak fertility:
- High circulating estrogen wants a woman’s body to be softer, to hold more body fat and fluids, invests in tissue that has no direct value to sport, such as breasts and uterine lining that will shed after making us feel bloated, and our weight will fluctuate on a monthly cycle.
- True equality in sports, like any other industry, requires rebuilding the systems so there is an equal chance to thrive
- We need to create a formal certification to work with female athletes that mandates education on female physiology, puberty, breast development, menstrual health, and the female performance wave
Author: Good for a Girl, A Woman Running in a Man’s World
Publication date: 10 January 2023
Number of pages: 288 pages
