3 Important Aspects To Consider When Prepping As A Female

While prepping for a physique show for a guy and a girl is inevitably the same, in that the goal is to maintain lean tissue (muscle) while losing body fat, the journey you may have to take to get there can be vastly different.

Some considerations for girls when prepping may include:

1. Length of prep

Often girls experience more 'peaks' and 'troughs' in their fat loss phase then men.

Their fat loss can be far less linear but instead will peak and trough and often it's in an unstable, highly variable manner.

Consequently, fat loss will appear to stall more frequently and the speed at which you can lose maximum fat while losing minimal muscle is slower than that of a male for a whole lot of reasons.

For this reason, your prep length should be longer than the average prep (>20 weeks) in order to allow for variability in expected results and most importantly, to minimise muscle loss.

2. Training approach

Women tend to be able to handle higher intensity based workouts as opposed to voluminous ones, and they appear to be able to recover faster than men also.

For this reason, the primary focus from a training perspective for females should be strength training.

Similarly, HIIT cardio is my preference for that mode of exercise as well.

Furthermore, given women have a less than optimal hormone profile for muscle building, it is critically important to maintain strength in the gym in order to maintain muscle on the stage.

My recommendation would be to focus on hitting heavy weights more frequently as opposed to heavy volume sessions.

3. Caloric accuracy

The harsh reality is that women tend to carry less muscle than men, are smaller in stature and genetically can not diet on as high a calories as their male counterparts.

Consequently, dietary intake error is far greater in women and has less room for error than in men.

A man who is eating 2500 kcal per day and who over-consumes by 250 kcal in a day has only increased his intake by 10%. Whereas if a woman who is eating 1600 kcal per day would be eating at the same surplus would have increased her intake by 15%.

For this reason, eating with accuracy is even more important for the girls than it is for the guys.

And there you have it, 3 important aspects to consider when prepping as a female. There are other variables such as hormones, the effects of the menstrual cycle on measurement accuracy and macronutrient diversity (ratio of protein/carbs/fats) as well, however, these 3 are a great start for most.

Diet Smart. Not Hard.

Coach Dean.