This guide came out of a long conversation between three women: our host, a guest who took the strength-training side of the topic, and a guest who took the endurance side. It follows an earlier episode on aerobic and strength training, and it takes on what most training plans ignore entirely: hormones change week to week, and then decade to decade, and the same workout and the same plate land differently depending on the phase.
The framing is not that women are fragile. It is that the differences are large enough to plan for. Estrogen and progesterone shift metabolism, strength, endurance, appetite, mood, water balance, and bone turnover. Ignore them and you spend years fighting your own physiology; work with them and the same effort returns more.
