Can women gain just as much muscle as men?
Take-aways
While males will gain more muscle than women, their rate of progress is actually similar.
Males and females appear to respond similarly to set volumes and %1RM, as it relates to muscle growth.
While there are slight differences in how males and females should train to maximise progress, there are fewer differences than commonly believed
Females may experience more fast twitch fiber hypertrophy than males, whereas males may experience more slow twitch fiber hypertrophy than females.
A hot-off-the-presses meta-analysis by Refalo and colleagues sought to assess differences in how much muscle males and females are able to gain from lifting weights. Most people assume that men are just much better at gaining muscle and strength than women; but is that really true? Is the rate of progress really dissimilar between males and females?
When analysing muscle growth as a % of baseline, the answer was a resounding “no”.
The authors also ran a whole host of different analyses on the data to see whether there were any cool sex-specific relationships. Unfortunately, not many robust relationships turned up, suggesting males and females may not respond to volume or %1RM that differently when it comes to muscle hypertrophy.
There was one potential exception, though: females may observe more fast-twitch fiber hypertrophy, but less slow-twitch fiber hypertrophy, than males (on average).
