May 29

May 29 Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes

Author: Christine Yu
Publisher: Riverhead
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

How the latest science can help women achieve their athletic potential

Over the last fifty years, women have made extraordinary advances in athletics. More women than ever are playing sports and staying active longer. Whether they’re elite athletes looking for an edge or enthusiastic amateurs, women deserve a culture of sports that helps them training programs and equipment designed to work with their bodies, as well as guidelines for nutrition and injury prevention that are based in science and tailored to their lived experience.

Yet too often the guidance women receive is based on research that fails to consider their experiences or their bodies. So much of what we take as gospel about exercise and sports science is based solely on studies of men.

The good news is, this is finally changing. Researchers are creating more inclusive studies to close the gender data gap. They’re examining the ways women can boost athletic performance, reduce injury, and stay healthy.

Sports and health journalist Christine Yu disentangles myth and gender bias from real science, making the case for new approaches that can help women athletes excel at every stage of life, from adolescence to adulthood, through pregnancy, menopause, and beyond. She explains the latest research and celebrates the researchers, athletes, and advocates pushing back against the status quo and proposing better solutions to improve the active and athletic lives of women and girls.

TL;DR Review

Up to Speed is a really interesting, important book. It started a little slow for me because I happened to already know some of the info presented, but that definitely wasn’t the case the whole way through.

For you if: You’re a woman who is active or pursues athletic goals (or coaches women).

Full Review

As a person who spent nearly 5 years writing content for a company focused on the gender wealth gap, I immediately put any book that talks about gender gaps on my list. And as a hobby runner, I pulled this one to the top. What a fascinating, important book Yu has given us.

She discusses the current state of research into how women’s bodies respond to standard fitness advice (spoiler alert: it’s paltry at best). Then she talks in depth about various aspects of athletics — exercise, nutrition, hormones, menstruation, etc — and points out the current danger of too little information and challenges to researching it more. She also highlights people who are doing the work today and tells stories from elite women athletes.

It started a little slow for me because I’m so familiar with the presence of gender gaps overall (I didn’t need to be convinced of that), but that definitely wasn’t the case the whole way through. Any woman who is active or pursues athletic goals (or coaches women) should read this book.