The Edge Vol 53 - Nutritional Fitness for Female Surfers

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Gender specific nutritional fitness

Differences in metabolism, nutrition, and supplements.

I don’t know about you, but these days I love watching the women’s CT events. The girls are blowing up, perhaps at a more accelerated rate of progressive evolution than the men. So what’s a surfer girl to do when it comes to nutritional fitness?

A number of the women on the championship tour adhere to some specialized, custom plan for nutritional fitness. I suspect some of these nutritional regimens are based in part on a growing body of research being accumulated in this area.

Recent Research

M.A. Tarnopolsky has been a lead researcher and is well published. Here is a review of an abstract from Tarnopolsky’s research (with a few good dr edits). For many decades researchers did not consider that there were any differences between the genders in the metabolic response to exercise. As a result, nutritional recommendations and exercise training prescriptions have not considered the potential for gender specific responses. More recently, it has been demonstrated that females oxidize proportionately more lipid and less carbohydrate during endurance exercise as compared to males. The oxidation of amino acids is similarly lower in females as compared to males during exercise. These gender differences are partially mediated by a higher estrogen concentration in females.

Specific areas where there are gender differences in nutritional/supplement recommendations include carbohydrate (CHO) nutrition, protein requirements and creatine (CRM) supplementation. We have shown that females do not carbohydrate load in response to an increase in dietary carbohydrate when expressed as a percentage of total energy intake (i.e., 55-75%), however if they consume >8 g CHOxkg(-1)xd(-1), they show similar increases as compared to males.

Top sport male and female athletes require somewhat more dietary protein as compared to sedentary persons. The maximal increase is approximately 100% for elite male athletes and approximately 50-60% for elite female athletes. Fortunately, most athletes habitually consume this level of protein intake. It has also recently been demonstrated that females show a lesser increase in lean body mass following acute CRM loading as compared to males. Females also did not show reductions in protein breakdown in response to CRM loading, whereas males did.

What does this all mean?

Chris Schmidt, senior analyst and co-director of Euromonitor’s consumer health research has a few suggestions. Schmidt advises that when looking for supplementation, it is imperative for the surfer girl to evaluate gender-specific product differentiation and targeted formulas. Products should speak to the unique nutrition concerns of women, including toning (as opposed to bulking up), bone health, joint health and skin health. Ingredients like folic acid, calcium, vitamin D, collagen and Co-enzyme Q 10 can address multiple concerns and provide true added value to protein products and non-protein products (such as all-in-one pre-workout supplements).

Supplementation should also appeal to female fitness goals, which often emphasize weight maintenance, body toning and sustained energy. Supplementation for the surfer girl should avoid the often hyperbolic, mass-building claims that most men’s brands emphasize and which are mostly not the right choice for surfers boys either. Good examples of women’s bottom-up (no pun intended) innovation include Bio Synergy Ltd’s Active Woman in the UK.

While gender-specific sports nutrition is still in its infancy, the market shows strong potential. In the future we expect that there will continue to be on-going research from which more specialized gender specific nutritional/supplement recommendations can be made.

References for further review are shown below: