Female athletes: if you constantly feel tired, slow, or like you’re out of shape…the problem might not be your fitness.

The Problem: Too Much Output

One thing I see with female athletes is they are incredibly driven. They’re practicing, lifting, doing extra conditioning, playing their sport, and trying to improve every single day.

More ≠ Better

The issue isn’t that you aren’t working hard enough. The issue is that your training stress may be exceeding your ability to recover.

The Empty Tank

Training Side: Recovery Side:

1. Lifting 1. Sleep

2. Practice/Games 2. Fuel

3. Conditioning 3. Rest

Too much of the training side leads to accumulated fatigue.

When you’re constantly operating with an empty tank, you don’t feel like yourself.

You start thinking:

• I’m slower

• I’m weaker

• My conditioning is bad

• I’m not progressing

But sometimes the problem isn’t your fitness. It’s your ability to recover.

The Solution: Build Your Week with Purpose

Goal:

Maximize Performance

+

Minimize Fatigue

A great training week isn’t about doing the most. It’s about creating the right balance of stress and recovery.

Female Athlete Off-Season Blueprint

Your training should change throughout the year. The goal is not to do everything at 100% all the time, it’s to prioritize what matters most for the phase you’re in.

1.Early Off-Season: Build the Foundation

Primary Goal: Build the physical qualities that support long-term performance.

Training Priorities:

Increase Strength

Increase Work Capacity 

Increase Tissue Capacity

Continue to Maintain: 

Speed 

Power 

Sport Skill

Key Message:

The early off-season is where we build the foundation. Strength becomes the priority, but we never remove athletic qualities like sprinting and jumping because they require consistent exposure.

2.Pre-Season: Transfer Training to Sport

Primary Goal: Convert physical improvements into sport-specific performance.

Training Priorities: 

Speed

Power

Change of Direction (COD) 

Conditioning

Continue to Build + Maintain: 

Strength 

Tissue Capacity

Key Message: As competition approaches, training becomes more specific. We shift toward qualities that directly impact performance while maintaining the strength and durability we built in the off-season.

3. In-Season: Perform + Maintain

Primary Goal: Keep athletes healthy and performing at their best.

Training Priorities: 

Practice & Competition 

Recovery

Maintain: 

Strength 

Power 

Speed

Key Message: The goal during the season is not to chase new fitness gains. It’s to maintain physical qualities, manage fatigue, and allow athletes to perform when it matters most.

Closing Thoughts

The goal of training is not to see how much fatigue you can tolerate, it’s to create the right balance between training stress and recovery.

The Fitness-Fatigue Model (Banister et al., 1975) helps explain why athletes can feel tired, slow, or “out of shape” even when they are training consistently.

Every workout creates two responses: a positive fitness response and a negative fatigue response.

The fitness side is what we are chasing, becoming stronger, more powerful, faster, and more resilient.

But every training session also creates fatigue, which temporarily reduces performance.

When training is balanced with proper recovery, fitness continues to build and performance improves.

However, when fatigue accumulates faster than the body can recover, that fatigue can mask the progress an athlete has made.

This is why the answer is not always more conditioning, more workouts, or more intensity.

Sometimes the athlete who feels like they need to do more actually needs a better balance of training, recovery, and fueling.

The best athletes are not the ones who do the most.

They are the ones who understand how to apply the right amount of stress, allow their body to adapt, and build toward peak performance when it matters most.

Train with purpose. Recover with intention. Perform with confidence.

Reference

Banister, E. W. (1975). Modeling the Training Process. In D. A. Landers (Ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Biomechanics in Sports (pp. 1–23).