The Purple Cloth | Issue 1

Evidence-Based Insights for Women’s Health & Performance

Women’s health and performance science is moving quickly. That is good news—but it also creates a problem.

Research involving women is increasing, yet social media is moving even faster. We are being told to train according to our menstrual cycle, avoid certain foods, eat differently because we are women, fear carbohydrates, manipulate cortisol, take increasingly complicated supplement stacks, and completely rethink exercise after menopause.

Some of those conversations are rooted in legitimate physiology. Others take a small amount of evidence and turn it into a very large claim.

The Purple Cloth exists in that space between the research paper and the Instagram post.

Here are seven things worth knowing right now.

MAJOR FEATURE

Stronger for Life: Why Women Need Resistance Training at Every Age

For years, resistance training for women was marketed primarily around appearance: get toned, tighten up, burn calories, sculpt your arms.

The research increasingly tells a much bigger story.

A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis examining resistance training in women across the lifespan found significant improvements in strength in both premenopausal and postmenopausal women. Importantly, older women remained highly responsive to resistance training.

That matters because muscle is not merely aesthetic tissue.

Maintaining strength and lean mass supports physical function, glucose regulation, metabolic health, independence, and the ability to continue doing the things we want to do as we age.

And the benefits do not stop at muscle.

A separate 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 60 studies in postmenopausal women found resistance training produced favorable changes in resting heart rate and blood pressure, including moderate effects on systolic and mean blood pressure. Researchers also reported favorable vascular and autonomic findings.

In other words:

Resistance training is not just bodybuilding.

For women, it is increasingly appropriate to view it as part of a long-term health strategy.

That means the conversation should shift away from:

“Should women lift weights?”

toward:

“How should we appropriately progress resistance training throughout a woman’s lifespan?”

The answer will differ based on training experience, health status, goals, and life stage. But the overarching message is increasingly difficult to argue with:

Women should build strength before they desperately need it.

NUTRITION

Female Athletes Don’t Just Need More Food. They Need Better Fueling Strategies.

Low energy availability continues to be one of the most important issues in female sports nutrition.

When energy intake repeatedly fails to support both exercise demands and normal physiological function, athletes may experience consequences involving reproductive health, bone, metabolism, recovery, immune function, and performance.

But one of the more important developments in the conversation is that sports nutrition is moving beyond simply asking:

“Did the athlete eat enough calories today?”

We also need to think about when those calories were consumed.

Long gaps without adequate fueling around training can leave an athlete spending substantial portions of the day in an energy deficit—even if total intake looks more reasonable by bedtime.

This is especially important in adolescent athletes, where energy is needed not only for training but also for growth and maturation.

A 2026 scoping review examining nutrition education and low energy availability in adolescent female athletes identified RED-S as a growing concern and highlighted the need for better education before problems emerge.

A better performance-nutrition question is:

Does her eating pattern actually support the demands of her day?

That means looking at breakfast, school, practices, strength training, competition, recovery, and evening meals as one connected fueling system.

Not simply counting calories.

TRAINING

Female-Specific Training: What Actually Needs to Be Different?

There is finally more attention being paid to female physiology in exercise science.

We need that.

But recognizing female physiology does not mean every female athlete needs a fundamentally different training system.

A recent review examining popular nutrition claims aimed at active women found that many rigid sex-specific recommendations circulating online go substantially beyond the available evidence. The researchers looked at claims involving fasted exercise, menstrual-cycle hydration, carbohydrate use, and precise protein timing.

The broader lesson applies to training, too.

Menstrual symptoms may influence how an individual woman feels or performs.

Pregnancy matters.

Postpartum recovery matters.

Perimenopause and menopause matter.

Iron status, energy availability, pelvic-floor health, and hormonal health can matter enormously.

But that is different from saying:

“Every woman should automatically train according to the same menstrual-cycle calendar.”

Individualization is still individualization.

Programming should begin with:

• What adaptation are we trying to produce?
• What is her training history?
• What is her current capacity?
• How is she recovering?
• Are symptoms affecting training?
• Is she adequately fueled?
• How is performance actually responding?

Female physiology deserves consideration.

It does not require turning women into a completely different species.

EMERGING / TRENDING

GLP-1 Weight Loss Has Created a New Question: What Happens to Muscle?

GLP-1 medications have fundamentally changed the weight-management landscape.

The next major conversation is likely to be about what kind of weight is being lost.

Appetite suppression can make it substantially easier to achieve an energy deficit. But dramatically reduced food intake can also make it harder to consume adequate protein and other nutrients.

That matters because weight loss can include both fat mass and lean tissue.

Researchers are now actively studying ways to preserve muscle during GLP-1 therapy, including resistance training and nutritional intervention.

This creates a much more useful conversation than debating whether GLP-1 medications are inherently “good” or “bad.”

The relevant questions become:

Is the person eating enough protein?

Are they resistance training?

Are strength and functional capacity being preserved?

What happens after substantial weight loss occurs?

For women—particularly women entering midlife—this is going to become a major health and performance issue.

The goal should not simply be to create a smaller body.

It should be to preserve a capable one.

SOMETHING YOUNG

Teenage Female Athletes Need More Than a Sports Drink and a Protein Bar

Teenage female athletes live at the intersection of two extremely demanding physiological processes:

growth and training.

Their bodies are developing bone, muscle, reproductive function, and neurological capacity while simultaneously being asked to practice, compete, recover, and sometimes strength train.

That makes underfueling especially concerning.

Iron is another major consideration.

A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis reports iron deficiency in approximately 15–35% of female athletes. Researchers found that interventions can improve iron status, particularly in women who begin with low iron stores.

But this does not mean every tired teenage athlete should start taking iron.

Fatigue can have many causes, and unnecessary iron supplementation carries its own risks.

Instead, parents and coaches should watch for patterns such as:

• persistent fatigue
• declining performance
• unusually poor recovery
• changes in menstrual function
• frequent injury or illness
• restrictive eating
• chronically skipping meals

Menstrual health deserves particular attention.

Menstrual dysfunction in teenage athletes should not automatically be dismissed as an inevitable consequence of training. Low energy intake, stress, training load, and disordered eating can all contribute, and early recognition matters.

The teenage female athlete should not have to choose between health and performance.

Properly supported, the two should reinforce each other.

SOMETHING OLD

Menopause Changes Physiology. It Does Not Eliminate Adaptability.

One of the biggest problems with the menopause conversation is that women are frequently given one of two messages.

Either:

“Nothing really changes. Just keep doing what you’ve always done.”

Or:

“Your hormones have changed, so everything you used to do is now wrong.”

Neither is particularly useful.

Menopause does bring physiological changes that can affect body composition, cardiovascular risk, bone, recovery, and other aspects of health.

But menopause does not switch off the body’s ability to adapt to training.

Research involving postmenopausal women continues to demonstrate improvements in strength and cardiovascular outcomes with resistance training.

And yet an enormous research gap remains.

A recent evidence map reviewed 3,867 records in highly trained, elite, and world-class female athletes.

Only two studies focused specifically on perimenopause or menopause.

Two.

Pelvic-floor health and breast health were also strikingly underrepresented.

So here is where the evidence-based position needs some humility.

We know enough to strongly encourage women to preserve strength, muscle, cardiovascular fitness, and good nutrition as they age.

We do not yet know enough to justify every highly specific “menopause training protocol” being marketed online.

That distinction matters.

SOMETHING GOOD

Continue the Conversation

About The Purple Cloth

The Purple Cloth translates emerging research in women’s health, nutrition, exercise, and athletic performance into information women, athletes, parents, coaches, and professionals can actually use.

Evidence first. Application second. Hype last.

References

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Isenmann, E., Geisler, S., Havers, T., Siegert, F., Hemke, F., & Held, S. (2026). It’s never too late: The impact of resistance training on strength and body composition in females across the lifespan—A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 29(10), 1174–1185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2026.03.002

Matkin-Hussey, P., Black, A. D., & Black, K. (2026). Misled or misfed: Nutrition claims targeting active females on social media, is there research evidence to support them? Proceedings of the Nutrition Society. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0029665126103085

McCarthy, E., Pekler, J. P., Tran, T., Deluca, L. E., Fresco, T., Hampton-Marcell, J., Penalver Bernabe, B., Hamstra-Wright, K., Koenig, M. D., Colegrove, D., & Tussing-Humphreys, L. (2026). The effect of diet and dietary supplements on iron status of active females: A systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional trials. Sports Medicine. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-026-02464-x

Muslichah, R., Styles, S. E., Matkin-Hussey, P. A., Love, T. D., & Black, K. (2026). Role of nutrition education in preventing low energy availability among adolescent female athletes: A scoping review. Nutrition Reviews. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/nutrit/nuag032

Rivera-Mejía, S. L., Rúa-Alonso, M., Rial-Vázquez, J., Nine, I., Camacho-Villa, M. A., Enríquez-González, M. G., Varela-Sanz, A., Fariñas, J., Revuelta-Lera, B., Fraga-Germade, E., Giráldez-García, M. A., & Iglesias-Soler, E. (2026). Resistance training improves cardiovascular health in postmenopausal women: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Physiology, 141(2), 619–641. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.01180.2025

Sancho-Haro, E., Muñoz-López, M., Baz-Valle, E., Villanueva-Tobaldo, C. V., Tornero-Aguilera, J. F., López-Gil, J. F., López-Moreno, M., Martín-Rodríguez, A., & Clemente-Suárez, V. J. (2026). Optimizing weight loss in the GLP-1 era: Preserving muscle mass, function and metabolic health through precision nutrition and resistance training. Pharmaceuticals, 19(6), Article 897. https://doi.org/10.3390/ph19060897