Happy International Women's Day

Do you programme your workouts around your menstrual cycle? When adding in a deload week, it's useful to take this into consideration. If you've had a rubbish session or a great session, it could be due to many reasons, but the stage of your cycle could be one of the things you might not think about. Women have more testosterone mid-cycle when they're ovulating, so this can be a good time to plan a heavy session or attempt a new personal best. Feel free to talk openly to your PT about these things so they can create a programme that's right for you, and also know when and when not to push you to get your target reps.

Menopause is being talked about more often now, and whilst the symptoms of oestrogen dropping can make you feel like not wanting to do a workout, it's still important to get some regular exercise, which can help. During perimenopause, this could also be a good time to have a look at reviewing your nutrition; should you maybe be cutting down on caffeine, alcohol or products high in sugar? Could you consume more legumes? In any case, the gym is place to be sweaty, so don't worry about the hot flushes - everyone will assume you're beasting your workout!

How about men and women working out together? A couple's workout or friends spurring each other on can be great, but there are some differences to bear in mind:

If following the same routine as each other, when doing pyramid sets (where the weight goes up and the reps go down for each set), for example, if a man starts off with set one at 20kg for 10 reps (200kg lifted in the set) and goes up to 22kg for 8 reps (176kg lifted in the set), and a woman starts off with 14kg for 10 reps (140kg lifted in the set) and goes up to 16kg for 8 reps (128kg lifted in the set), compared to the first set, the man is only lifting 88% on his second set, whereas the woman is lifting 91.4% on her second set. Now of course, this could quite easily be the other way around if the woman is stronger than the man, so if this is the case, ladies, don't give the gents too much grief for not keeping up with you.

Some interesting differences between men and women's training are:

• Intensity - Women can typically do more reps at the same percentage of their 1 rep max than men can, and they become less overall systemically fatigued per set.

• Rest times - Women typically need less rest in between sets than men.

• Volume - The number of sets of exercises which women can train productively in one session is typically higher than males (20 - 25 sets for males, 30 - 35 for females per session).

• Recovery time - Women can sometimes work the same muscle groups again in less days than men need to rest for.

• Deload - Women may not need a deload week as soon as men; they can often do an extra week of being productive.

(These are all averages, of course there are plenty of exceptions.)