[Females in performance sports from the sports medicine viewpoint].
Especially in the endurance disciplines, the performance of women went up considerably in the course of the past few decades. This seems to be peculiar to the female sex and can be taken as a hint to a higher adaptability of the female organism with respect to the various motor capacities required for strength and endurance. During the past 10 years, however, the rate, with which the performance gap in the endurance disciplines narrowed, has slowed down distinctly. Thus, it seems, that the era during which the women vigorously caught up on the men, is coming to an end in the endurance sports. The different capacity of the sexes with respect to strength is rooted in the differently dimensioned cross sections of the muscle fibres and in the higher activation capability of the skeletal muscles of men. No differences exist with respect to the relative proportions of the ST-, FTa- and FTb-fibres and with respect to the biochemistry of the muscles. Just as in case of men, the adaptation of the cardiovascular system to endurance training manifests in a uniform enlargement of all of the heart's cavities. It is true, that women have a smaller heart volume and lower values for the maximum oxygen uptake, but these differences or by no means related to sex alone. Very often, they are produced by the fact that the endurance training of the women did not go that far. As regards the energy substrates, there is the hypothesis that women have better utilization of free fatty acids under conditions of prolonged and intensive physical work.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)