Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple

As a woman, if I honestly thought there were things we should do differently to optimize our results, of course I would be doing them myself and telling other women to do them too.

The narrative that women need a sex-specific program or nutrient timing guidance or a particular intensity of exercise or rep range or all of it,

It makes women feel like they're being spoken to and being considered and they're in their part of this community instead of, oh, you know, just do what your boyfriend does or what your husband does.

So the narrative is very much women are not men.

And so obviously women need something different.

The data says men and women respond to exercise very similarly.

Thank you.

When we look at how the muscle responds, so we look at muscle protein synthesis in response to exercise or nutrition, there are no differences.

Very similar protein metabolism response.

Very similar growth response.

The major difference, and this is hormone related, is the baseline muscularity because

During puberty, when men experience a surge in testosterone, that coincides with an increase in muscle mass.

So if you take an untrained adult man and an untrained adult woman, there will be a disparity in their baseline muscle mass.

And that is due to differences in testosterone.

However, once they start training, they will gain similar relative size.

Not so much because we're talking about those supraphysiological levels, and that's the real game changer.

So if we think about even with men, what is the normal range of testosterone, we don't see this relationship between, oh, you know, you're closer to 900 and you are going to respond better to resistance training.

So as long as you're within that wide normal range, there doesn't seem to be a predictability of your response to training.

However, once we get into those supraphysiological levels and we're taking that exogenous hormone, then yes, we are going to develop levels of muscularity that wouldn't necessarily be possible.

That's right.