Female Athlete Sport Science Versus Applied Practice: Bridging the Gap

Female-specific science, medicine, and innovation have grown steadily since the turn of the decade as the focus on female sport continues to advance. While this growth is welcome, and despite the best of intentions, it is not always coupled with valuable application.

This commentary discusses barriers faced when developing and applying sport-science research and innovation activities in female sport. We offer several practical solutions to help safeguard the progress of female athlete health and performance support. We make 3 suggestions: (1) multicenter studies to increase the number of elite athletes participating in research and enhance statistical power, which is often lacking in sport-science research; (2) further acceptance of case studies in elite sport research, as they can include context alongside athlete data that more traditional research designs perhaps do not; and (3) collaborative, codesigned approaches to research and innovation, wherein researchers, practitioners, and athletes all contribute to balancing scientific rigor with applied "real-world" understanding, which may result in the generation of richer, more meaningful knowledge for the benefit of female athletes and their environments.