the joy of strength training

Gubernatrix

January 18th, 2010 at 10:52 pm

Women’s Strength Training Network

Folks, I have started a group on Facebook called the Women’s Strength Training Network. I hope many of you will join it. It is independent of this website, although clearly there’s a lot of synergy in the content.

Truck pull

The aim is fourfold:

Be a source of support for women who are ‘out there’ strength training, usually in a male-dominated environment.

Lots of us are or have been the ‘only woman in the weights room’ and while most of the time we just get on with it and enjoy it, sometimes it is nice to have other women to chat to about strength, or simply to know that there are other women doing what we are doing. It’s hard not to feel like a freak sometimes – but there are more of us than we think! The group will demonstrate this clearly.

Highlight inspirational feats of strength by women and positive role models for female strength – not necessarily elite athletes either!

No matter how internally driven you are, it is always good to see inspirational people doing amazing things. From elite athletes pushing the boundaries to ‘ordinary’ people overcoming obstacles to achieve their goals.

Something I hear about from men in particular is the difficulty of finding postive role models to show their partners or female friends, and to combat the many myths about strength training for women that abound. Guys, this group is your answer!

Raise aspirations and standards in women’s strength training.

Women have the potential to be very strong but most women – and men who train them – have little idea what they should be aiming for. Someone once said to me that the biggest problem with female athletes is male coaches – and he was talking about the low expectations that some coaches have for female strength. So without getting too gung-ho, let’s explore what some objective strength standards are (I’ve done this elsewhere on this site but let’s expand that discussion) and back it up with experience and evidence.

Get more women into strength training

This group is primarily for women who have already decided that they want to get stronger. I’m sceptical about attempts to proselytize to so-called cardio bunnies; I don’t want to force anyone to lift weights who doesn’t want to.

That said, there are messages about the benefits of strength training that are being lost. If more women knew that strength training would strengthen their bones and joints, help them lose fat, make them fitter and more mobile and generally improve their quality of life for decades to come, maybe they’d give it a go. There are many people out there pounding the pavements who don’t particularly enjoy it but think it is the path to good health. Maybe they’d prefer weight training…

Discuss!

In the next few days and weeks I’ll start some discussions on these and similar topics in the group and I do hope you’ll join in – and start some of your own.

I’ve disabled comments on this post because I hope that if you have thoughts to share you will post them on the group site.

More food for thought:

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