This book excerpt from Developing Endurance goes over nutritional strategies for pre-competition and during competition phases to maximize performance.

The goal of this article is to promote professional dialogue and broaden the knowledge of ways to use nutrition and recovery techniques to work with the physiological changes that come throughout the menstrual cycle.

The purpose of this article is to share the importance of the menstrual cycle’s effects on elite athlete performance, and how these effects should influence the training and recovery of high-performing athletic women.

This article from Personal Training Quarterly looks at training plans based on menstrual health to help personal trainers better support female clients. Visit NSCA online to read more on athletic performance, health, and fitness.

This excerpt briefly explains nutrition periodization for different training cycles to help maximize performance for endurance athletes.

This article serves to educate people about the menstrual cycle in the tactical female population. It provides a framework for how to work through the phases of menstruation to increase training response, and thus, overall success in military training.

Nutrition and dietary intake are key factors for exercise and sport performance. While a substantial body of research highlights the impact of nutrition on exercise, many dietary and nutrient recommendations are based on research studies only conducted in men. However, the distinct physiological, neurological, and hormonal changes across a woman’s life cycle significantly affect nutritional needs. This narrative review explores key recommendations for calories, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and select supplements, highlighting the absence of sex-specific guidelines in current dietary frameworks for strength and conditioning female athletes. The review synthesizes current literature to provide practical guidance for coaches, sport dietitians, and health practitioners to optimize both performance and health outcomes for female athletes.

Erica Suter provides insights that help drive optimal performance in female athletes though research behind the menstrual cycle, the functions of female hormones, and application to the female athlete at the 2024 NSCA’s Coaches Conference.

This section from the book, Developing Endurance, gives an overview of how to plan and develop a program for endurance athletes by following four steps.

This article summarizes the relevant literature regarding post-workout nutrient timing and its importance to training adaptations, specifically increasing skeletal muscle hypertrophy and replenishing skeletal muscle glycogen stores.