For decades, women athletes have done what women have always done in sports. Adapted.

They trained within systems built around male physiology. They recovered using protocols largely derived from male performance data. They competed despite higher rates of ACL tears, stress fractures and chronic pain, and they performed at elite levels anyway.

In sports like soccer and basketball, research has shown women to be two to eight times more likely to suffer an ACL tear than men, a disparity widely reported by institutions such as Yale Medicine. NCAA injury surveillance has also found higher stress fracture rates among women athletes, particularly during preseason training. But adaptation should never have been the long-term solution.

Much of the modern sports performance ecosystem, from training models to recovery research to product development, has historically centered the male body as the baseline. That bias shaped everything from workload standards to rehabilitation timelines to which technologies received validation and funding. It also shaped the evidence base itself. Women remain underrepresented in many areas of sports science research, a gap documented in journals such as BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine and widely discussed in reporting on the gender........

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