Interview with Christine Yu, Author of Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes
Christine Yu is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports science and women athletes. Her writing has appeared in Outside, The Washington Post, Runner’s World, and other publications.
She’s a lifelong athlete and yoga teacher who loves running, surfing, and skiing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Christine Yu’s Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes is out now from Riverhead Books. She sat down to answer questions on women in sports, athletic development, and research for her book.
Jacquelyn Scott: Congratulations on your recent release, Up to Speed! What inspired this book?
Christine Yu: I’m a journalist and I cover sports, science, and health. I especially love telling stories at the intersection of sports science and women athletes—understanding how the body performs and specific sport-related issues through the lens of women and their experience in sports.
The idea for the book came out of my reporting. As I talked to women athletes and experts in the field, I noticed that even as women have excelled in sports, there's an underlying sense that women and our bodies are an anomaly in the athletic world. I realized how little we know about female physiology and sports performance. I wrote this book to understand why women are excluded from exercise physiology and sports science research, the implications of this gender data gap, and how we can build a better, more inclusive system of science and sport.
Scott: What do you see as the biggest challenges women face in achieving their athletic potential?
Yu: Girls and women aren’t empowered to be body literate. It leaves girls and women with gaping holes in understanding their own bodies and I think that’s the biggest challenge to women achieving their athletic potential.
For instance, it wasn’t until I was in my late 30s that I learned that adolescence and early adulthood is a critical bone building period when you lay down roughly 80% of your adult bone mass. If you don’t reach your maximum bone mass, you can’t “catch up” later. Bone health is heavily influenced by nutrition and hormones like estrogen, which is dependent on a regular menstrual cycle. I was shocked when I learned this but also angry. Why wasn’t I taught this when I was younger?
When we learn about menstrual cycles in school, we only learn about it in the context of reproduction. We don’t learn about all the other roles those hormones have in the bone and how they influence bone health, cardiovascular health, metabolism, temperature regulation, etc. It creates an environment in which harmful myths about women’s bodies persist like the idea that losing your menstrual cycle is a good thing, that it’s a sign that you are fit and training hard when in fact it can have long-term repercussions for athletic performance and health. You put your body at risk for bone stress injuries and early onset osteoporosis. It drives the culture of under-fueling in sport, which leaves you at risk for overtraining, injury, and burnout. It doesn’t set women up to achieve their athletic potential.
Scott: How does your book challenge common myths and gender biases in sports and exercise science?
Yu: The book challenges the myths and gender biases by drawing attention to the systems and institutions that underpin sports and science because those systems and institutions and how they frame issues and who they center matters. Sports and science were both developed to prioritize men and their experiences. It created blindspots that make it hard to notice who is left out and left behind. It baked in a certain amount of gender bias from the beginning.
For example, I recount numerous examples of the wild reasons given throughout history to justify keeping women out of sports. Most of the reasons centered on a woman’s reproductive system and how competitive
sports and vigorous physical activity could impair a woman’s ability to bear a child. These reasons were based on assumptions and beliefs about a woman’s body, not actual studies. In fact, women scientists and physicians refuted these claims through scientific research but their research wasn’t taken seriously by the men who were in the position of power.
But if women weren’t allowed to compete in sports, then why would scientists even think to study them? You can start to see why the system excludes women because they were never even considered from the beginning.
I think when we look at these examples together, you start to realize that there is a bug in the system, a bias against women that’s built in from the beginning. Oftentimes, we’re so immune to this bias because it just surrounds us in so many aspects of our life and it’s just the way things are done. My hope is that by reading the book, it makes people more likely to pause and ask why is the system the way it is? Why have women been excluded or left out of sports and science?
Scott: Your book covers women's athletic development across the lifespan, from adolescence to menopause. What are some key considerations for each of these stages?
Yu: Female bodies go through several periods of transition throughout the lifespan, a period of time when the body changes physiologically and it may take some time to adapt.
During adolescence, there’s so much pressure on adolescent girls to look the part of an athlete, usually an idealized body type based on what Olympians or other “successful” athletes look like in their sport. For young female athletes, this can be disorienting because their body is changing tremendously. They may feel awkward or clumsy, like they can’t control their body in the same way or run as fast. It’s easy to blame puberty and want to stop it or keep your body from changing. But don’t.
It takes time to get used to your new body and these changes are all part of the normal development process and ultimately, athletic development and performance improves because of maturation if you don’t interfere with it.
During adulthood, one of the most important things is to eat enough and often. Your body needs food to rebuild tissues that are broken down during exercise and adapt to training. If you don’t feed your body consistently, it’s counterproductive to an active lifestyle.
In general, women’s bodies are more sensitive to downturns in energy compared to men, especially carbohydrates. Prolonged dips in energy during the day can also suppress metabolism and estrogen levels and increase cortisol. The body also starts to shut down non-essential systems, which can cause a cascade of reactions that influence menstrual and hormonal health, cardiovascular health, bone health, immunity, gut health, mental health, recovery, injury, and performance over the long-term.
During pregnancy and the postpartum period, take your time. You may be told that you can resume exercise at their six-week postpartum visit but that six-month clearance was never intended for physical activity. It was meant to say, your tissues are healed and there is no infection.
The physiological, hormonal, and anatomical changes that accompany pregnancy don’t disappear right away. It takes time just as it will take time to return fully to your active lifestyle just like it takes time to return to sport after an injury. Rushing back can lead to problems down the line such as pelvic floor dysfunction and bone stress injuries. Instead, take a graduated, progressive approach and give your body grace and patience.
During the menopause transition, your fitness can feel like it falls off a cliff and the body doesn’t respond to training the same way it did in your twenties and thirties. And it feels like it’s your fault because, after all, age is just a number! But that adage is overly simplistic. Of course, there is no expiration date on one’s active life or performance goals but there are very real physiological changes happening that may influence how you feel during exercise and how your body adapts to training. It’s not in your head.
You can still achieve your athletic goals. However, it requires a perspective shift. Since your body now is different now, you can’t expect to continue training the same way and get the same results. Your body might need a different stimulus, like lifting heavier weights or incorporating some high-intensity sessions.
Scott: How can we create a culture of sports that is more inclusive and supportive of women athletes?
Yu: Currently, only 6% of sports science research focuses on women and women make up just 34% of study participants. That means that our understanding of sports science is weighted heavily towards men and male bodies. It can distort our understanding of what’s considered “normal” physiology. We end up making assumptions about exercise and fitness and how bodies are supposed to adapt and perform based on a partial picture of the human population.
If we want to make sports more inclusive, we need to make science more inclusive because when you don’t see yourself in the research literature or it doesn’t reflect your lived experience, you’re left without appropriate or adequate guidance. It makes you question your place in sports and who physical activity is for.
We also need to normalize discussion of female-related topics like the menstrual cycle, breast health, pelvic floor health, and life stages like the pregnancy and postpartum period as well as the menopause transition. Right now, those aren’t always welcome or comfortable topics to discuss within the realm of exercise and sports, especially with coaches and athletic training staff who tend to be mostly men. But again, if we want girls and women to feel comfortable playing sports and to reach their full potential, we need to be able to support them as full human beings and that includes acknowledging their lived experiences as women athletes.
Scott: How did you approach the research process for Up to Speed?
Yu: Because each chapter of the book covers a specific topic, I worked on one chapter at a time. Otherwise, there was too much information to try to keep track of in my brain!
I started off reading as much as I could about each topic to get a lay of the land. This included what’s been in the media as well as scientific studies and research papers. Alongside that, I’d have a working list of the experts I wanted to speak with who could help answer questions and provide more context. There’s also a storytelling element to the book. Each chapter includes several stories from women athletes. These stories served as case studies and helped bring the science to life. I’d have a running list of athletes who I thought might fit in the chapter.
After I read the research and interviewed the experts and athletes, I went through the material to pull together the main themes or key points that started to emerge. This would often bring up more questions which required additional research and/or interviews. It was a very iterative process!
Scott: What do you hope readers take away from "Up to Speed," and how do you see this book contributing to a larger movement for women's sports and health?
Yu: This is a great question. So often girls and women are made to feel like their bodies and experience in sport doesn’t quite fit in the athletic world. It’s almost as if we have to leave a part of ourselves behind when we step into the athletic arena. Don’t talk about periods and menstrual cycles. Tough it out and ignore anything that makes you seem weak. Smush your breasts down as much as possible so they don’t draw attention.
I hope readers see that their experiences are valid; it’s that the system wasn’t designed to accommodate our experiences. And that means as women, we often need to advocate for ourselves more.
I think we’re at an inflection point and this book is part of the larger discourse highlighting the need to reimagine our systems and institutions so that they are more reflective of the whole human population, not just one segment. We seen this trend in women’s health over the last few decades and now we’re seeing it in other arenas like women’s sports.
Women’s sports is a legit, viable market and women athletes have accomplished so many incredible things despite all the obstacles in their way. My book makes the case that we’re leaving opportunities on the table because of the gender data gap. Just imagine what women would be able to accomplish if we actually had better information? If we were actually empowered to use that information to make better decisions?
Scott: What are you currently reading or working on?
Yu: I’m currently reading a lot of romance! That’s my fiction genre of choice and my brain definitely needs a little escape post-publication. I recently finished Emily Henry’s Happy Place and Carly Fortune’s Meet
Me At the Lake. I’m about to start Same Time Next Summer by Annabel Monaghan.
Scott: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve received?
Yu: A writing teacher once told me that writing is very similar to running.
As a runner, I know that not every run will be amazing. Some days will be great while other days will feel terrible and I’ll never want to run again. But either way, I keep showing up. It’s a practice that I keep working on.
Writing isn’t going to be perfect every day either. Some days, writing is going to feel hard while other days, it will feel easy. However, I need to keep showing up and practicing. Once I began to think of writing as a practice, it completely changed my relationship to writing and helped take a lot of pressure off each writing session because it didn’t have to be perfect.
From Penguin Random House:
Up to Speed by Christine Yu
How the latest science can help women achieve their athletic potential
Over the last fifty years, women have made extraordinary advances in athletics. More women than ever are playing sports and staying active longer. Whether they’re elite athletes looking for an edge or enthusiastic amateurs, women deserve a culture of sports that helps them thrive: training programs and equipment designed to work with their bodies, as well as guidelines for nutrition and injury prevention that are based in science and tailored to their lived experience.
Yet too often the guidance women receive is based on research that fails to consider their experiences or their bodies. So much of what we take as gospel about exercise and sports science is based solely on studies of men.
The good news is, this is finally changing. Researchers are creating more inclusive studies to close the gender data gap. They’re examining the ways women can boost athletic performance, reduce injury, and stay healthy.
Sports and health journalist Christine Yu disentangles myth and gender bias from real science, making the case for new approaches that can help women athletes excel at every stage of life, from adolescence to adulthood, through pregnancy, menopause, and beyond. She explains the latest research and celebrates the researchers, athletes, and advocates pushing back against the status quo and proposing better solutions to improve the active and athletic lives of women and girls.
Get your copy from Penguin Random House.
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