Tomorrow the Giro d'Italia Donne kicks off and we will see the world's best champions in action on our roads. Inspired by their achievements and their needs is the Cycling Women Project, a multidisciplinary project dedicated to athlete health in women's cycling, created to promote prevention, wellness and sustainable performance in female cyclists. Born within Cycling Lab, it aims to introduce a new, structured and conscious approach to protecting sports health in the "pink" world.

"It is not simply a consulting service, but a cultural project before it is a technical one - explains Andrea Zanfrini, founder of CyclingLab. - In recent years, professional women's cycling has made an extraordinary leap: greater international visibility, structured calendars, increasingly professional teams, integration with men's events and high-level competitions. At the same time, an increasingly relevant debate has emerged on fundamental issues for the health of the female athlete: RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport), burnout, weight management, body composition and performance-related pressure. The Cycling Women Project is born from this awareness".

In the sports medicine center based in Mendrisio specialized in bike fitting and services designed for cyclists, professionals and former high-level athletes work, such as Damiano Cunego, who today brings his experience to practitioners of all ages and levels as a personal trainer. "Women's cycling today is more competitive and more media-exposed. However, without a structured culture of prevention, the increase in performance demands risks amplifying existing vulnerabilities – Zanfrini continues, physiotherapist, biomechanist and specialist in intermittent hypoxia. - Conditions such as amenorrhea, reduced bone density, stress fractures, chronic fatigue, burnout, inadequate nutrition for training loads, and pressure on body composition are not isolated cases, but systemic signals that require specialized tools and multidisciplinary coordination. The project intervenes precisely in this area: structured prevention in women's sports health".

The Cycling Women Project integrates personalized protocols based on female physiology, with a scientific approach aimed at preserving hormonal balance and bone health in athletes. It offers bike fitting sessions, sustainable personalized nutrition plans, structured post-injury or post-maternity pathways, with particular attention also to the mental health of female cyclists. Within the project that offers online and in-person consultations, high-level professionals are involved, including psychologist Manuela Ansaldo, nutritionist Federica Minetti, sound therapist Maria Angela Ciurleo, sports scientist and endurance coach Alice Maggio and medical professionals who prescribe therapies when the issue moves from functional to pathological. "The innovation of this project - Andrea continues - is that all the professionals involved communicate with each other and if a cyclist presents a problem, everyone is able to propose a specific therapeutic program that is absolutely compatible with the work of other therapists. In this perspective, we want to present thematic areas of possible reasons for consultation, where each professional describes their proposed therapy".

At this stage it is initially aimed at athletes, with the idea of extending training and tools in the future to coaches, trainers and managers. The goal is not only to improve physiological parameters or optimize performance, but to build new awareness: health is not an obstacle to performance, but its essential condition. The Cycling Women Project intends to guide women's cycling toward faster growth, but above all healthier and more sustainable over time.

Learn more at www.cyclinglab.ch/cycling-women-project.