Coach's Corner: We Are Not Small Versions of Men

In 1994, an 11-year-old girl walked into a weight room for the first time and walked right back out. She was the only girl in the room. Surrounded by middle school boys, unfamiliar equipment, and a culture that didn’t yet know what to do with female strength, she quit after one day.  

A year later, she came back. Two months after returning, she qualified for Junior Nationals. Two months after that, she placed second in the country.  

That athlete was Carissa Gordon Gump (OLY, MPA), who went on to become a five-time American Open Champion (2002–2006), a multi-time American record holder in weightlifting, and a 2008 Resident Athlete at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Today, she also serves as Executive Director of the NSCA Foundation.  

Her story is not an outlier tale of grit. It’s a snapshot of an era, and a starting point for understanding how women’s performance strength training has evolved. Not just in who shows up, but in how systems, coaching, and culture have (slowly) learned to support them.  

Then: When Female Strength Existed Without a System  

When Carissa entered the weight room in the mid-1990s, women’s Olympic weightlifting wasn’t yet an Olympic sport. Female lifters existed, but barely. There were no large communities, no shared resources, no established pathways.  

“There weren’t thousands of us,” Carissa recalls. “There were dozens. We all knew each other.”  

Training knowledge came from a narrow funnel:  

• One primary coach  
• A small, insular peer group  
• Occasional national camps… run almost entirely by male coaches  

There was no internet ecosystem. No female-specific research. No differentiated programming.  

Most importantly, there was no separation between male and female physiology in training design. Programs were built on male data. Recovery was assumed. Hormonal fluctuation, nutrition timing, psychological load… none of it entered the conversation.  

Female athletes weren’t expected to be understood by the system. They were expected to survive it.  

And many did. But survival is not the same as support.  

What Survival Required AND What It Cost  

For Carissa’s generation, toughness became the currency. You trained through soreness. You trained through anxiety. You trained through uncertainty.  

“You just pushed,” she explains. “Recovery wasn’t weakness, but it also wasn’t a real priority.”  

That mentality produced strong athletes. It also produced quiet consequences:  

• Burnout  
• Injury  
• Shortened competitive windows  
• Identity collapse after sport  

Carissa only fully recognized this later, after stepping away from competition.  

“Weightlifting shaped me. It gave me opportunities. But it was something I did, NOT who I was.”  

That distinction, between performance and personhood, is one many high-performance environments still fail to protect today.  

A Parallel Perspective: Where Strength Was Welcoming  

Before Carissa ever had language for what she was navigating, she was already collecting reminders of why she stayed. One still hangs on her wall today… a personal inspiration poster she built early in her career. It isn’t motivational fluff; it’s life’s success strategy. At a time when she had seemingly few people in her corner, Carissa knew she had to pull the drive and desire from within. It became a visual record of goals, beliefs, and self-trust.  

Carissa's Inspiration Poster

“That poster reminded me of why I trained,” Carissa explains. “It wasn’t about proving anything to anyone else. It was about staying connected to what I was capable of.”  

That internal anchor mattered, especially in environments that didn’t yet reflect women back to themselves. While Carissa was learning to navigate strength spaces that hadn’t yet made room for women, Meg Stone was coming up in a different context altogether.  

Raised and trained in Scotland, Meg, moving on to become the first women strength and condition coach for a major US university, a two time Olympian in the discus, a 7-time NCAA champion, and the former NCAA record holder in Shotput and Discus, has set new standards for how we integrate the entirety of strength training. For Meg, it was never about gender but about empowerment and delivery. In fact, Meg tells us, she didn’t experience early strength training as exclusionary.  

“It was cultural,” She explains. “Post-war Europe expected women to do hard work. Women worked on roads, in engineering, in physical jobs. Strength wasn’t unusual.”  

When Meg entered weight training, she wasn’t bracing herself for resistance. She was welcomed into purpose-driven preparation.  

The contrast became clear only later, when she moved to the United States.  

“It was completely different,” she says. “Suddenly, strong women were seen as freakish.”  

Meg didn’t retreat. She allowed her experience to highlight something important: women’s outcomes in strength training weren’t about capability. They were about context.  

Carissa survived systems that weren’t built for her. Meg benefited from systems that, at least culturally, expected women to be physically capable.  

Both truths matter.  

Now: Representation Has Grown AND Understanding Is Catching Up  

Fast forward three decades.  

Women now fill weight rooms. They compete in massive numbers. They coach. They lead programs. Olympic lifting is no longer niche, it’s foundational across sports from basketball and swimming to track & field and wrestling. But participation was never the real finish line.  

The real shift, the one Carissa and Meg both point to, is conceptual:  

Female athletes are not small versions of men.  

This is no longer philosophical. It’s physiological.  

Coaches are beginning to understand that:  

• Hormonal fluctuation matters  
• Recovery needs differ  
• Nutrition is not gender-neutral  
• One-size-fits-all programming fails women  

Meg is direct about where the field still struggles.  

“Most coaches aren’t poorly intentioned,” she says. “They’re undereducated.”  

Technique and load are taught. Biology, cycles, and recovery rarely are.  

Where Coaching Still Falls Short  

Despite better representation, many training environments still operate on outdated assumptions. Carissa sees it when women are trained identically… without conversation, without flexibility. Meg sees it when coaches avoid critical topics altogether.  

“How many male coaches will ask about the menstrual cycle?” Meg asks. “They’re terrified of the conversation. But it’s part of life and it affects training.”  

Avoidance doesn’t protect athletes. It creates blind spots.  

The result is often the same pattern:  

• Rigid training blocks  
• Universal recovery prescriptions  
• Silence around readiness and fatigue  

The system hasn’t caught up to the athlete.  

The Real Competitive Advantage: Precision, Not Softness  

Neither Carissa nor Meg argues for less intensity. Without question, both believe completely that women want and can train as hard as the men. Women can train heavy. They can train fast. They can train with elite intent. The difference... they do these things with a different precision and a different biology. How coaches embrace this will set the standard for years to come.   

“The body can do incredible things,” Carissa says, “once the mind gets out of the way.”  

Meg expands the idea:  

“You want to be pushed,” she says. “Not protected from the work, BUT INSTEAD, supported through it.”  

The most effective environments going forward will:  

• Individualize by athlete, not template  
• Normalize conversations around cycles, nutrition, and recovery  
• Treat mental readiness as seriously as physical output  
• Design systems that support longevity not just peak moments  

This isn’t softness. It’s professionalism.  

Sidebar: What This Means for Your Weight Room  

If you coach women today, inclusion is no longer the bar. Intentional design is.  

1. Program With Biology in Mind  

• Build flexibility into weeks, not just blocks  
• Use autoregulation without labeling it “backing off”  
• Align intensity with readiness, not just the calendar 

2. Normalize Performance-Critical Conversations  

• Give athletes permission to communicate honestly  
• Treat cycle awareness as a coaching tool, not a taboo  
• Educate staff so athletes aren’t self-managing in silence  

3. Treat Recovery as a Variable  

• Match recovery tools to training goals  
• Avoid default recovery prescriptions  
• Teach athletes WHY recovery choices matter  

4. Protect Identity Beyond Output  

• Reinforce preparation over validation  
• Support transitions intentionally  
• Build confidence that outlasts competition  

Framework: The Coach’s Checklist for Modern Women’s Performance Strength  

Use this as a quick self-audit for your program, staff, or weight room.  

Programming & Load  

☐ Are women’s programs flexible rather than rigid templates?  
☐ Do intensity peaks account for individual readiness, not just the calendar?   
☐ Is autoregulation encouraged and respected?  

Education & Communication  

☐ Are coaches educated on female physiology beyond surface-level knowledge?  
☐ Are menstrual cycles discussed as a performance variable, not avoided?   
☐ Do athletes feel safe communicating fatigue, stress, or recovery needs?  

Recovery Systems  

☐ Are recovery tools applied strategically, not universally?   
☐ Do recovery protocols change based on training phase and athlete need?   
☐ Is recovery measured and reviewed, not assumed?  

Environment & Culture  

☐ Does the weight room reward preparation and consistency, not just toughness?   
☐ Are female athletes represented in leadership, coaching, or mentorship roles?   
☐ Is confidence built through mastery, not intimidation?  

Long-Term Athlete Development  

☐ Is identity outside of sport supported, not ignored?   
☐ Are transitions (off-season, injury, retirement) handled intentionally?   
☐ Is longevity valued as much as peak performance?  

• Reinforce preparation over validation  
• Support transitions intentionally  
• Build confidence that outlasts competition  

The Throughline   

It would be easy to frame progress as toughness being replaced by care. But that would be wrong. Carissa’s generation proved women could tolerate almost anything. Meg’s generation proved they didn’t have to.  

What connects them is belief supported now by knowledge, language, and systems that are finally beginning to evolve. Women’s performance strength training didn’t change because women did.  

It changed because the coaches started listening. The question now isn’t whether women belong in the weight room. It’s whether our systems are worthy of the athletes standing in it.