WonderBar! is a women-only masterclass on real strength training – by women, for women. I’ve been asked to help instruct the afternoon, along with female trainers from Crossfit London. I can’t wait to meet a new host of women wanting to get into strength training!

The class is on Saturday 19th May in London. This is the first one – if it’s a roaring success, hopefully there will be more!

Click here to book

The class is suitable for all ages and fitness levels – we are keen to get as many women involved in strength training as possible.

It’s going to be a fun, friendly atmosphere and full of inspiration, so come along and bring your female friends too. You can work at your own level – all exercises will be scaled as appropriate.

For you fans of strength, this is a great opportunity to persuade a sceptical mate that strength training is eminently do-able, fun and effective.

We will focus on the deadlift, the overhead press, the back squat and the pull-up, classic strength exercises that work the whole body. You will be taken through technique step by step, with encouragement all the way.

And I’m sure there’ll be chances to ply the expert team of instructors with any other questions you have.

The masterclass takes place at Crossfit London’s gym in London, E2. You can book via the Crossfit London website here.

I hope to see you there. Let me know if you’re coming along!

I have just finished another successful Ladies Who Lift course and have been musing on the changes I have seen in women’s lifting over the last few years.

Women have trained with weights for centuries, but it has flowed in and out of fashion. Right now, it’s a growing trend. But is it growing fast enough to gain real momentum?

Rising standards

There’s no doubt that more women are lifting weights than ten years ago.

The growth of personal training has much to do with this; women who have personal trainers are much more likely to be doing some kind of resistance training on a regular basis than women who don’t.

Expectations have risen; clued-up personal trainers – still unfortunately in the minority – now understand that most of their female clients, with the right training and guidance, can aim to squat and deadlift more (sometimes much more) than their bodyweight.

This is progress indeed; I remember a time when even wanting to use a 20kg Olympic bar caused consternation and presumptuous concern for one’s wellbeing! ‘Are you sure you want to lift that?’

In fact, I had to revise the Strength Standards for Women that I originally put together in 2008, as the standards of the ‘normal’ weight training woman have risen. If I need to revise it again in 2 years’ time, I’ll be happy.

Positive influences

The growth of Crossfit has been a positive influence and – the occasional controversy aside [who can forget Albany Crossfit?] – has done a fantastic job of presenting women’s lifting in a positive light and actively encouraging women to get stuck into serious lifting.

Crossfit has been particularly successful in busting the ‘lifting will make you bulky’ myth, with its focus on leanness, performance and fitness.

I remember seeing those early Crossfit videos around 2005 with Annie, Nicole, Eva and the rest and being impressed and inspired. My first experience of olympic weightlifting was through Crossfit; now it’s my favourite hobby and I’ve just qualified to lift at the British Championships. So I have good reason to be thankful for Crossfit.

The internet and social media have made it much easier for women to access good, reliable information about weight training, be inspired by elite female athletes and meet like-minded women online. Stumptuous from Canada remains the mistress in this category, still going strong. Girls Gone Strong is a recently-formed US collective that will no doubt be influential in years to come. I do my bit here in the UK, with this website and my Ladies Who Lift courses.

I am, however, looking forward to seeing women’s strength training getting beyond the ‘mutual validation’ and ‘aren’t women brilliant?’ phase (which we women do so well) and into a more practical phase where we just do stuff and enjoy ourselves.

Worrying trends

There are one or two aspects of this social media growth that I’m less enthusiastic about.

Of late, I’ve noticed a conflation of weight training with being super lean. There’s a trend of posting images of very cut women as role models for weight training or even strength. In my opinion, they are more role models for dieting than for strength.

I have no problem with women being super lean if they want to, I just think that the issue is getting confused. ‘Strong is the new skinny’ is becoming ‘extreme dieting is the new strong’ in certain quarters. Personally, I like ‘women are the new strong’. Maybe I’ll put that on a t-shirt.

Something else that hasn’t moved on as fast as I thought is the mainstream women’s media, primarily women’s magazines, catching on to this new trend of female strength and performance.

While the men’s magazines have picked up on the ‘functional’ craze and generally seem more diverse in their training coverage, women’s magazines still inhabit the comfortable, familiar realms of cardio, yoga, swiss balls and pink weights. I realise that strength training is never going to make the top story, but the odd feature would be nice.

Women-only training

Women training with other women is important and should be encouraged – your girls will make better progress.

My own Ladies Who Lift women-only courses are growing well and I’ve seen women-only lifting sessions springing up at a few other clubs and gyms (such as Bethnal Green Weightlifting Club, Crossfits London and Reading and Olympic Gym in Eccles).

I used to think that I would make better progress training with men because they lift heavier and often have a more aggressive approach to training, but I have changed my mind on this. Having trained over the years with both men and women, I find training with other women who are physically similar to be more motivating and productive than training just with men.

Women can train hard and be aggressive, it just looks a little different – and I will be expanding on this in an upcoming article. But it’s also true that many women, myself included, blossom under a more positive atmosphere. It doesn’t matter whether you rant and rave or not, if the outcome is that you improve your lifts and grow in strength and confidence.

On a side note, I’m pleased that the ‘train like a man’ trend has subsided. This phrase, often used by male trainers to berate their female clients, puts the ownership of weight training squarely with men. In order to do it properly, women are supposed to behave ‘like men’. Hmm, no wonder they didn’t come flocking.

Now the rhetoric is ‘train like a girl’ and this is coming from women themselves – a much more positive development.

Incidentally, I love Nia Shanks’ reply to a girl who approached her while she was deadlifting and asked, ‘Why do you train like a man?’ Nia replied: “Take a look around the gym. Most guys in here bench press every day and then spend an entire hour working on their biceps. And the closest thing to a ‘leg exercise’ they perform is walking to the water fountain. So you see; I don’t train like a man.”

The future

The future is bright for women’s weight training but there are a few areas that I would like to see develop and I will be doing my bit to make this happen:

• More opportunities for women to lift with other women on a regular basis.
• More recognition from women’s magazines that proper resistance training is something to aspire to and will get results.
• Higher standards among female trainers in resistance training and being role models in their own gyms

And yes, we still need to make the argument that lifting weights won’t make you bulky and unattractive. This is a tricky one but more people are persuaded every year so I believe it is a case of, keep doing what you’re doing, to everyone who works hard to make this argument.

So what changes have you seen? Do you agree with my analysis or am I way off base? And what would you like to see in the future? Share your thoughts below!

This is a guest post from Giles Greenwood, weightlifting Commonwealth Games gold medalist, now coach at Bethnal Green Weightlifting Club. Giles runs a REPS-accredited weightlifting instructors course aimed at fitness professionals who want to perform and teach the olympic lifts.

I have been coached by Giles for the last few years, and during that time he has given me much advice on how to address my considerable competition nerves. I’ve implemented his suggestions and am performing better as a result! Now Giles has brought his advice and experience together in this post, which I hope you find as useful as I have. Over to Giles…

As a weightlifter I was not a natural competitor, it was something I had to learn.

I was practically dragged to my first competition, bombed out at my first Commonwealth Games and performed badly at my second Commonwealth Games when I felt the pressure of being the favourite after Stefan Botev pulled out. I suspect that if Botev had lifted, I would have performed better as an also-ran.

Although disappointing, the second Commonwealths was certainly an improvement over the first, and my third Commonwealth Games was to be the best performance of my weightlifting career.

I had controlled my debilitating nerves, allowing me to focus on the task at hand and fulfil my potential.

Admit the problem

The first stage of controlling your competition nerves is to accept that there’s a problem which needs addressing. It is easy to admit to a physical weakness (that you need more leg strength if you want to get up with your cleans for example) and take the appropriate measures. A mental weakness is more difficult to accept but is just as trainable as a physical one.

Once you have decided that you need to work on your approach, familiarity and routine are your friends. What follows are some tips which worked for me.

Train for competition

When you are training, imagine you are in a competition. Lift correctly and try to picture a referee telling you to put the bar down at the end of each lift. That extra half second under the weight will accustom you competition rules so you don’t have to adapt to them on the day.

Change your training “spot”

You never know what you’ll be looking at when you lift in a competition so it’s a bad idea to get used to always lifting in the same spot in the gym. If your gym has more than one platform, train on a different platform each workout; if not, try turning to face a different way for some training sessions. It is also helpful to regularly visit other gyms for a workout.

All of this makes you more focused on the bar and platform than on the environment around. The one thing all competitions have in common is that you will be lifting a heavy weight on a platform. Whatever the environment, from a local gym competition to the Olympic Games, the competitor stands on a platform on his / her own and performs a snatch or clean & jerk with a weight which is challenging to them. Focusing on this helps you to stop focusing on, and being intimidated by, the surrounding environment.

Build a pre-training and pre-competition routine

Before each training session, watch the same video of your favourite lifter to inspire you to train hard. If possible, edit this together with video of your best performance so you start to associate your best performance and your favourite lifter with good training sessions. Listen to the same piece of music before each training session and eat the same pre-training snack.

If you routinely do all of these things, it is easy to do the same before each competition. This gives you a link between competing and training, reminds you that they are basically the same thing and helps settle your nerves. I used to use a different tune in the build up for each competition (ranging from Hanson to Motorhead) but kept the same video, Waldemar Malak lifting in the 1992 Olympic Games followed by some of my own lifting.

If nerves are affecting your performance, why not give these techniques a try? For me, they made the difference between missing all my lifts and getting a gold medal. It was worth taking the chance.

Giles adds: thanks to Professor Dave Collins, sports scientist and psychologist, who nagged me into trying these techniques and in doing so contributed significantly to my eventual successes.

Do you get nervous when competing? Have you tried any strategies to overcome them? Share your experiences in the comments below!

My BLT without the bread. What crazy nonsense!

Anyone who has successfully changed their eating habits away from the norm (sugar and fat laden processed crap and swathes of starchy carbohydrate) to a diet which keeps them lean, fit and energetic (generally speaking, high in protein, veggies and fats, with carbs appropriate to goals) has probably encountered anything from mild teasing to outright hostility from co-workers, friends or family.

It’s important to understand that they are the ones who feel uncomfortable and threatened – there is no need for you to feel that way.

Now, why other people should feel so uncomfortable and threatened by one’s lunch is complicated, but what I’m interested in is how do you deal with this?

Most of my personal training clients have this problem, and I did too when I was an office worker. You won’t be surprised to learn that I used to try to win people over by talking about it – proselytising, even.

The problem with ‘healthy debate’ in the office environment is that it can all too easily descend into outright argument as people defend their positions. People have been fed so much misinformation for so long, they aren’t going to change their views overnight. Anyway, no-one wants to look like the loser in front of their co-workers.

Although it is always good to discuss things with people who are receptive to it, I now think that this tactic was asking for trouble on many occasions.

Nowadays, I simply say to people, “I’ve had great results eating this way and I love it!” This is difficult to argue against. If you are just starting out and haven’t got your great results quite yet, another way to put it is to say: “I want to do something different and this is really working for me.”

Rather than saying something that implies the other person is wrong – such as “it’s healthier to eat this way” – make it about your own personal choice. It’s harder to get angry with someone who has simply made a personal choice to do something a particular way (although some people will always find a way…).

You can also mention benefits that you have experienced, such as “I feel more energetic eating this way” or “I don’t get as hungry as I used to.” Again, it’s hard to argue against someone’s personal experience, whereas it is easy to argue the toss over statements like “fat is good for you” or “wholegrains are healthy”.

I’m lucky enough to have come out the other side after many years, but what strategies have you employed? Has it hampered you in reaching your goals or did you shrug it off?

Share your experiences below!

Put it down, woman!

1. You might break a nail.

2. You could even bruise a male ego or two.

3. You’ll eat properly and still be able to lose fat. Work of the devil!

4. You’ll look more like an athlete and less like a runway model. Skeletal is sexy, right?

5. You’ll be able to lift heavy things without asking a man for help, thus upsetting the balance of the universe.

6. You will be seen in public without high heels.

7. You’ll grunt, sweat and feel sore. So unladylike!

8. You’ll be proud of your pert bum instead of being self conscious about it like a normal woman.

9. You’ll be more active and confident instead of sitting around looking pretty. What are you, some kind of feminist?

10. You’ll be stronger, leaner and sexier – and we all know where that can lead!

For me, the key to success in changing your life can be summed up as: learn, aspire, believe.

Learn

If you want to be slimmer, fitter, stronger and healthier, learn how to do it. What else in life did you achieve without any learning? You had to learn to read, drive your car, play your sport and carry out your trade.

How you learn best is up to you. You can read books, find an expert to learn from, or simply plunge into the deep end and learn by doing.

Aspire

Aspire to be a better version of yourself, not to be someone else. Aspiring to be better comes from an understanding of where you are now and where you want to be.

Aspirations are different from wishes. Wishing something was different doesn’t change anything. Aspiring to something for me implies a journey, a gradual progression to a goal.

Believe

Believe in your ability to carry out a programme of work and get the outcome you want. Believe in your ability to cut through the crap and make decisions for yourself. I believe that everyone can become an expert in their own change.

Self belief is the most important quality: you have to believe that you can learn, change and get to where you want to be.

So go on, make it happen!

My traditional Christmas Day workout this year was done to the theme of the Twelve Days of Christmas. It includes bodyweight exercises only as I do this in my nearest open space.

So we start with exercise 1for 1 rep, then do exercise 2 for 2 reps and exercise 1 for 1 rep, then 3 for 3, 2 for 2, 1 for 1 and so on – like the song! These are the exercises I chose:

1. Squat
2. Pistols
3. Tricep press up
4. Jumping lunges
5. V-sit ups
6. Press ups
7. Jumping squats
8. Supermans
9. Divebombers
10. Mountain climbers
11. Burpees
12. Tuck jumps

Merry Christmas everyone!

The recently published Weight Training for Women: A Beginner’s Guide by Lesley Harrison aims to fill a gap in the market by providing straightforward weight training advice for female beginners at the affordable price of £9.99 (the ebook version is even cheaper).

It is written from the point of view of an enthusiastic practitioner of weight training who wants to share her passion with other women and persuade them of the benefits of weight training.

The author is a powerlifter but doesn’t have any formal qualifications in strength coaching or personal training. This however is not necessarily a bad thing.

She knows how to train and isn’t encumbered by personal training jargon. Her advice is that of a knowledgeable friend in the gym – quite refreshing really. In fact, this is what I was aiming to achieve with gubernatrix.co.uk when I first started blogging around four years ago.

The book covers basic exercises,  training for various goals, including physique, sport and strength, along with tips about diet, injuries and so on. It includes, succintly, everything you need to know to get started with weight training, delivering what the title promises.

I was happy to see some information about strength sports; not everyone wants to compete but it is good to treat this as a normal progression for women, should they want to take things further.

I also like the information on gym etiquette – it is one of those topics that is often neglected in the ‘serious’ training books but is very useful information for people not used to the weight room environment. The author is clearly very aware of the challenges and barriers facing women who want to take up weight training and has addressed these well.

The book is suitable for complete beginners to weight training and those who have done a bit of weight training but want to explore it further.

Where it comes up short for me is the information on programming. Perhaps this is where the author’s inexperience in coaching shows through. The fat loss programme looks too much like a strength programme and the physique programme is somewhat unbalanced (it includes only one chest exercise but five exercises involving shoulders, two of which are isolation).

Fortunately there are plenty of good beginner programmes available on the internet. I recommend the training information on Stumptuous as a great place to start. A link to Starting Strength is included in the book’s appendix and I would also point beginners to this programme if they want to improve strength and technique.

In conclusion, then, this is a broadly successful book covering everything you need to know to get started with weight training, whether at home or at the gym.

If I’m completely honest, there are better tomes out there on weight training in general – but what this book has in its favour is that it is inexpensive and approachable.

This book could be a nice gift for a friend or partner who doesn’t know where to start and would appreciate a small, friendly book to get them going.

Weight Training for Women: A Beginner’s Guide is available from Need2Know Books.

If you are reading this article, on this website, you are already craving something more than a run-of-the-mill training experience.

Being different is a good thing, but that is often one of the hardest things to convince people when they start training.

There’s an interesting assumption that what everyone else is doing is right – the fallacy of the ‘authority of the many’, or the bandwagon fallacy. Where health and fitness are concerned, the many are evidently not right.

How many people do you know who are happy with the way they look, feel and perform?

Now think about how many people you know who go to the gym three times a week but are still overweight, stressed, tired and fighting an ever-losing battle with their aging bodies.

It takes a lot of bravery to stand out and do something different in an environment that is as exposed as a gym. For example, to be the only female in the gym doing weights, when all the other women are on the treadmills or in the yoga studio. Wouldn’t it just be easier to do what the other girls are doing, and hide in the crowd instead of presenting yourself as a piñata to be knocked down by the first jerk who opens his mouth?

To stand out from the crowd, to get exceptional results for your efforts, you need to be the sort of person who knows what they want and goes out of their way to get it, even if it means doing something different from what everyone else is doing.

You seek out people who can help you, people who know what they are talking about and can demonstrate this. You take the road less travelled.

This takes bravery and commitment. But the rewards are great.

When I started this blog several years ago, I was one of only a handful of women worldwide who wrote about proper weight training. People who found my website were ecstatic to find another iron enthusiast of this gender.

But what amazed me was the number of women scattered around the planet even doing this stuff on their own. Each pioneers in their own right. We’d all had similar issues: fear of what others would think, fear of looking stupid, of doing it wrong. Fear of being ridiculed or preyed upon by men, or just intimidated into going away and never coming back.

But individually we had all overcome these issues just by wanting it enough. And being the sort of people who don’t back down just because something is a bit difficult or out of the ordinary.

After some 12 years of going to the gym and learning it all the hard way, I finally became a full time trainer not long ago. You’d think this would make me pretty full of myself but actually I have found it a humbling experience. It has brought me into contact with so many people who – against greater odds than I ever had to face – are pursuing their path to strength and health with courage and purpose.

So this post is by way of celebration of all those people – women and men – who just get on and do it and aren’t afraid to be different. I am very excited when you drop by the website to add your thoughts. I’m always learning new things from you and am continually inspired by your independence, energy and dedication.

Cheers!

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending The Foundry’s inaugural ‘Heavy Weekend’ training camp: two days in the country at a secret Oxfordshire location, chucking heavy things around with a bunch of like-minded people.

I’ve known the guys and girls at The Foundry for a while now. Based in the City of London, they have a bias – of which I wholly approve – towards resistance training for performance, health and body transformations. It is therefore very much in The Foundry’s philosophy to develop a training camp around lifting, throwing, carrying and sprinting.

The Foundry has added some spice to the usual bootcamp format by getting specialist names in to coach the various skills, including Andy Titterell, pro rugby player and British Lion, Sarah Lindsay, 3-time winter Olympian, Evelyn Stevenson, national title winner in both powerlifting and olympic weightlifting and Sian Toal, Fitness England winner.

The programme ran the gamut of strength and conditioning training: on Saturday we had strongman circuits, powerlifting, touch rugby and some team competitions; on Sunday there was olympic weightlifting, speed and agility, and performance nutrition lectures.

If nothing else, there was going to be about a week’s worth of training packed into two days. Would we all survive?

How the weekend unfolded

Unfortunately I was only able to attend the Saturday as I was teaching my Ladies Who Lift class on Sunday. I wish I had been there to see what state everyone was in the next day! I was certainly rather sore when I did my own training on Sunday.

There were about 25 people attending; mostly men with a small number of women – perhaps five apart from me.

However, with more than half the coaching team being female, women were reasonably well represented.

We warmed up with a game of touch rugby out on the sports pitches. This was fast, furious and fun – a great ice breaker to start things off.

We then split into two groups – half of us went off to do strongman-style circuit training with Andy Titterell while the rest went to lift heavy barbells with Eve and Sian- and after lunch we swopped over. Free goody bags containing energy drinks, protein bars and other tasty snacks kept us going. The last event of the day was a team circuit which really got everyone’s competitive hackles up. The final result was very close!

How it felt

The weekend was fun and intense. You needed to be quite ‘up for it’ to cope with the pace and the (at times) competitiveness.

For some this might have been a bit intimidating, but also potentially exhilarating. I saw many participants grow in confidence throughout the day as they realised what they were capable of.

It also helped that we divided into two groups for much of the day: an experienced group who were confident with all the skills (or thought they were!) and a less experienced group who hadn’t been lifting for long and were less confident with all the techniques.

The techniques involved might be anything from being able to execute a deep front squat to knowing how to flip a tyre.

This allowed the coaching team to tailor the sessions to the experience level of the group and ensured that all participants had enjoyable and productive sessions.

Everyone I spoke to at the end of Saturday was stoked by the day and looking forward to day two.

While I headed back to London, the group was off for a well-deserved gourmet pub dinner and probably a sound night’s sleep before starting all over again the next morning.

So is it for me?

What you get out of the weekend depends on your level of experience and what you are interested in.

It is possible to go in as a complete strength neophyte but I wouldn’t recommend it. You need a bit of a strength base and some familiarity with basic lifting techniques to get the most out of it.

But if you have the basics, it’s a chance to have a go at more complex or unusual events like strongman or olympic weightlifting, where the specific equipment and coaching expertise required mean that opportunities to try these out are limited. You won’t find a yoke in your average gym. Or an internationally-capped rugby player, come to that.

The sessions act like a taster of a particular mode of training; they are a bit short to really master complex skills, but you can pick up some useful tips and try new things.

So if you want a total immersion in all things strength and conditioning and you are looking for a new challenge, this weekend is a great option.

Keep an eye on The Foundry‘s website to hear more about this and similar projects.