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What's different about the female athlete?

jenna gourlay softball softball sprint speed todd arnold
 

Todd:  So, Jenna, you have a great deal of experience with female athletes. Where’d that passion come from to take care of them?

Jenna:  Yes. So it started as for myself, being a female athlete throughout my career as a softball player and playing a lot of different sports growing up. I then coached softball and now I get to work with college athletes from multiple teams, all female athletes. And the entire time. I think what I realize now is that something is missing for us.  You know, there's a lot of strength and conditioning. There's a lot of development in the male sector. There's not as much attention for the female athlete. And I think we can bring so much more to make female athletes more powerful, more durable and better at their sport.
 

Todd:  And so the female athlete body is clearly different then. Give me an example. Like what's different from a male body?
 

Jenna:  So big difference is going to be our hips are different, so so much of our power and our alignment. What may work for a male may not work for a female. And if we ask a female to do things in the exact way that we ask a male to, it's hard and a lot of times it's not done correctly.  So we actually lose a lot of our power because we can't get into certain positions or it just doesn't make as much sense for us.

Todd:  And so one of the things that we both believe in, because we spent so much time together, is that you have to be able to move in specific ways. That movement is the basis. So we can make a move. But then if we put power on top of them, they're not going to compensate, right? Or they're going to come at it wrong, maybe?

Jenna:  Yeah. So if movement isn't great at the beginning, then you almost can't generate power. It's kind of like if we talk about something as simple as, like, a broad jump, If my body is not trusting my landing, it's actually not going to let me generate the power to jump forward. So we often think like, she just can't generate power.  What if I'm just not moving that well and my body knows we don't trust our landing, so we'll kind of we'll jump a little less. So there's a lot of, I think, power and like speed that's on the table for females. They just haven't figured out how to access it.

Todd:  And I think that we can go to this program and tap into what the best athletes in the world know. And you know, we know how to make a sprinting athlete go even faster at the top levels. So if we can tap into some of this, I think that we can do that for these female athletes as well. Yeah, cool stuff.

Our Softball Sprint Speed program is designed for female athletes by females.  Learn more about it here.

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