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!

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!

Some warning signs that you may need to improve your training fitness are:

• Your rest periods between sets are getting longer;
• You get tired quickly during the training session or need extra caffeine/stimulants to get you fired up;
• You have been doing heavy, near-max work for a while.

Improve training ‘fitness’ by spending a couple of weeks doing higher reps at 70 per cent of max. So for weightlifters that would be sets of 3-5, and for powerlifters sets of 5-8.

The best time to do this is just before you start a new strength cycle, on return from holiday or if you have been stagnating for a while.

Active rest is also under-utilised by strength athletes. Personally I use walking, circuit training or kettlebells. It makes you a fitter and more mobile human being, and this can help you tolerate more training and therefore get stronger. 10-15 minutes of high intensity circuit training will improve fitness and make you feel energised.

One of my favourites has always been Ross Enamait’s Magic 50. It has some of my favourite exercises in it and it kicks my butt! The Magic 50 is:

5 dumbbell snatches each hand
5 dumbbell swings each hand
10 burpees (with press up of course)
5 rounds for time

I also find that cleaning up my diet helps me to feel fitter and more dynamic. Often when you are going through a heavy phase of training it can be tempting to eat whatever is around; getting the calories in is important to support the training. However, in a ‘fitness’ phase you should be less hungry and tired and therefore this is the ideal time to sharpen up the eating strategy.

So how do you get fit to train?

More from gubernatrix

• Improve weaknesses with unilateral exercises
• How to: one arm dumbbell snatch
• Does lifting more always mean you get stronger?
• Five secrets of more effective training

My turn-around is mainly thanks to real life, known-to-me examples of people who have lost significant amounts of weight through walking. Just walking, not even dietary changes.

They simply walked for an hour (at least) a day, incorporating this walk into their daily life, i.e. walking to a destination instead of using public transport.

Well, duh, you might be thinking. Why was this such a revelation to me? Because I had bought into the idea that in order to get into shape you had to do lots of high intensity exercise, get yourself a personal trainer or at the very least join a class to push you to your limits!

Living in the fast lane

In recent years, society (at least here in the UK) has been cash rich, time poor and obsessed with shiny things. So industry and advertising has followed suit. All the fitness magazines are about how quickly you can get things done: achieve an amazing body in five minutes a day, get fit on ten minutes a day, use this shiny machine to halve your workout. It’s all about saving your precious time.

There’s no better example of this obsession than the tabata fad (typical headline: get fit in four minutes), which Graeme Marsh does a great job of analysing here.

Some fitness professionals would have us believe that the more money you pay and the less time you spend working out, the better your results will be. Funny, that.

But perhaps some of us have, or wish we had a more relaxed attitude to life. Why must we be obsessed with getting the maximum amount done in the minimum amount of time? What’s so great about that, other than bragging rights on the Men’s Health forum?

The ‘slow’ movement

Walking briskly for an hour burns the same number of calories as jogging for 30 minutes.

It seems counter intuitive, especially to people who find running difficult. But it’s true; although running burns more calories than walking, the difference is smaller than you think.

I know many people who would take the walking option every time. It is easier on the joints, easy to incorporate into daily life and there’s no lycra involved.

Shiny thing make it all better

There are some people who find it impossible to exercise unless they are surrounded by shiny machines, TV screens and ipods. Somehow the gadgetry makes it legitimate, acceptable, worth the time and energy.

But we have forgotten just how much exercise and calorie burn we can notch up in a single day just by taking the stairs or walking to our destination.

I know I sound like a government information campaign, but leading a more active life is not just for the unfit and overweight, it’s for everyone.

You might do 20 minutes of interval training three times a week in the gym, and that’s great as far as it goes. But what do you do for the other 167 hours in the week?

How much time do you spend sitting down? How’s your posture these days – got any lower back pain? Did you dash through the barriers on the Tube this morning, or did you wait and help the mum get her buggy down the stairs?

The drive to get everything done as quickly as possible, including exercise, means you might actually be missing out on a load of good stuff, including using your strength and fitness to make someone else’s day a bit easier.

It doesn’t always have to be hard

It is easy to fall into the trap of ‘if it’s not tough, it’s not doing me any good’. Lord knows, we are told this often enough by exercise gurus who are obsessed with getting “fast results”. Moderate exercise is no longer relevant; everything must be done as quickly as possible.

Folks, this isn’t the case. Walking is a great example of an exercise and a movement that is easy, fun, relaxing and good for you.

I have a fairly tough weightlifting schedule and on recovery/active rest days I don’t really want to do a high impact activity like running, but I also don’t want to sit around all day getting stiff.

Walking therefore suits me well, and not just on days off. It loosens me up, gets blood moving round my system to aid recovery, raises my heart rate and burns calories.

The mental benefits are also brilliant. It gets me away from the ubiquitous digital environment, allows me to de-stress, think problems through, or just enjoy being in some green space. It also gets me from A to B in a zero carbon way (well, apart from the CO2 I’m breathing out).

There’s no one way to train and everyone is different, with unique motivations and various goals. You can say what you like about my friends (they should have done this, that or the other) but they wanted to lose weight, they took up walking and they lost weight. A job well done.

I am walking a lot more these days, for recovery, relief from bad postural positions, some extra calorie burn and an enriched daily life.

Walking may not be shiny, fast-paced or over in twenty seconds but it certainly has its place in the exercise arsenal.

How is it possible that Tom Daley can be world diving champion at the age of 16? How can weightlifter Zoe Smith clean and jerk 110kg at the age of 16?

They must be supremely talented, right? They must have something that you and I can never attain: youth, talent, great genetics…

Talent

We tend to overestimate the importance of talent, and underestimate the importance of hard work. This is not surprising. Hard work is, well, hard work. Perhaps it is easier to put success down to someone else having more ‘God given’ talent than you, rather than admitting that they worked incredibly hard for their success.

Chris Hoy, four-time Olympic gold medallist in track cycling, is a believer in hard work being more important than talent in sport, since it teaches you to relate hard work to success:

“I think that ‘talent’ is vastly overrated in sport. I am thinking especially of power and endurance sports but the idea that even tennis players and golfers such as Roger Federer and Tiger Woods are the best in the world simply because they are the most talented is ludicrous; they have talent, of course, but they have maximised it by hard work.”

Matthew Syed, author of Bounce: How Champions Are Made, takes this idea further. He argues powerfully that talent is a meaningless concept that we use to rationalise what seem to be superhuman skills by top sportspeople. The key is more prosaic than that: hours and hours of practise from a very early age.

“Tiger Woods was given a golf club five days before his first birthday…by the age of five he had accumulated more hours of practice than most of us achieve in a lifetime.”

But surely Tiger Woods was massively talented at the sport of golf? Syed has an even more interesting example. He himself was a top table tennis player, winning three Commonwealth gold medals.  He points out that along with himself, the other top table tennis players in England were not only from the same town but from the very same street, Silverdale Road in Reading.

“For a period in the 1980s, this street and its immediate vicinity produced more outstanding table tennis players than the rest of the nation.”

What on earth was going on? Well, the kids on that street had access to a local 24-hour table tennis club, the nation’s top coach was a teacher at their school and they had plenty of people to practice with. They were very motivated and spent an enormous amount of time practising.

In other words, they had the opportunity, they worked hard and they got extremely good as a result.

Genetics

You might make the argument that genetics plays a powerful role in sporting success. But again, genetics might be overrated.

Practice has the ability quite literally to evolve the human body and make it better adapted for the movements it needs to make. That’s why adaptation is a key principle of training.

Swimmer Liz Johnson, a Paralympic gold medallist, is a fascinating example of this process. She was born with cerebral palsy which means that only one side of her brain works properly, controlling one side of her body. The other side of the brain is damaged and can’t control the other side of her body properly.

However medical scientists discovered that the reason she can swim the breast stroke so well is that the side of her brain that works properly has adapted itself to control both sides of her body. Swimming since the age of 3, she has actually evolved superhuman abilities through practice and repetition.

Environment and opportunity

It is not just practice and repetition, but also environment and opportunity. In Syed’s example of the table tennis players, opportunity (having a great club and coach on the doorstep) was clearly a major contributor to later success.

When the great long distance runner Haile Gebrselassie was asked about the difference between the success of the Kenyan and Ethiopian runners and that of western athletes, he mentions the fact that the former have been living and training at altitude their whole lives, whereas western athletes might spend a few weeks a year training at altitude.

The Kenyans and Ethiopians have also developed very effective training methods based on their environment, such as the famous ‘Kenyan Hills’, which runners all round the world now employ in their programmes.

Hard work

So what does all this mean for you and me? This is not meant to be a negative message of ‘you are not working hard enough’, but a positive message of what you can achieve if you do work hard enough and practise often enough.

We often make excuses based on perceptions of our own ability and its limitations: “I’m not built for that”, “I’m not very good at doing x”, “I could never do that, it’s too difficult”.

The truth is that we don’t do those movements often enough to get good at them. Everyone I know who really excels at something does it whenever they can, practically every day, giving 100 per cent.

Some people can walk into the sport of weightlifting and snatch their own bodyweight within a few months. One could easily envy that talent! But where do they go from there? Does every improvement come with such little effort, or will they at some point have to start working hard? Chris Hoy comments,

“Often, such talent is all you need as a youngster – but as you get older, and the competition gets stiffer, talent will only take you so far. At some point, you have to start working, and as people catch up, you have to work harder. Which can be hard to accept if you’ve never made the link between hard work and success.”

The lesson I take from this is to worry less about how much talent or ability you naturally have and simply focus on getting as good at your chosen skill as you can.

If you have to work hard right from the start, you are one very important lesson up.

I live in America. I like it, but in my opinion, we do not pressure our women into being strong and confident.

When I scan the magazine racks at the grocery store or the dentist’s office, the pictures suggest that we value two things in our women: breasts and razor sharp clavicles. Well, three things: STDs seem to get a lot of press as well…good grief.

You might call it a wretched case of extremely backwards priorities. The heartbreaker for me is so many of the girls I know, including my own sisters, buy into the stereotypes. In fact, they aspire to them in some cases.

Tuesday night kettlebell class

Every Tuesday night I teach a kettlebell training for beginners class. (I also throw in a bunch of other stuff, but it’s called a kettlebell class.) It’s  basically a “get really strong” class. 90 per cent of my students are female. When they first meet me, we shake hands, exchange names, and then they immediately tell me how weak and out of shape they are. I show them the kettlebells and demonstrate movements with a light weight.

“Oh, I can’t do that.”

When I tell them that we’re doing to do deadlifts they often say “Oh, I’m not in shape enough to do that” or “My back can’t handle that.” My response to these questions is always gentle, but pointed: “Says who?” Most of the time these lovely people can’t figure out where they got these silly notions. It’s because women are taught to underestimate themselves. It sinks in and they start to believe it.

Slowly my class has become – I don’t advertise it this way – my lab for the sole purpose of making women stronger without them realizing it.

Required pressing, required reading

Three months ago I began with a class of eight women. Every single one of them told me that they did not want to press overhead because it would give them big shoulders. In the second week I taught them the kettlebell press and the bottoms up press (turning the kettlebell upside down).

I now begin every class with everyone working on their favorite movement for ten minutes. Every single one of those women chooses the press nine times out of ten now. Some of them are pressing more than the men I see in the gym. Nothing makes me happier. There is nothing more fun for me than when the light flashes in their eyes and they realize I can do this. It’s the same process as the I’m-weak indoctrination, but in reverse: it sinks in and they start to believe it. And when they start to believe it, do not get in their way.

At the end of my classes, I write this URL on the board: http://gubernatrix.co.uk/. It is all that I do for required reading. I even make the men read it, which they are usually happy to do, especially when they realize that Gubernatrix is way stronger than they are. Good information is good information. And that’s all I am trying to give these women.

The change doesn’t occur because I am a genius or because I know something about strength training for females that nobody else does: it’s simply because I say the opposite of what society usually says.

I say:

1. Gain 10 lbs of muscle and you will be sexier than you can imagine

2. Lift as heavy as you (safely) can and you will be more confident

3. You are stronger than you think

4. Ignore your clavicles (most men aren’t looking at them)

5. Being strong does not mean sacrificing femininity

6. I know a five-foot-nothing homecoming queen who deadlifts 315

7. When someone tells you what you “should” be doing, ask yourself why

8. If you are not getting the results you want, something needs to change

9. You are stronger than most men I know

10. Perceptions will only change if enough of us work together to change them

It won’t happen fast, but it can happen. Every time I step into my class there are more women in it. It is because word gets around that it is fun to be strong. That there are people out there who say that women aren’t supposed to be weak, submissive, and that clavicles are seriously overrated.

Go get ‘em.

More from gubernatrix

• Ladies who lift
• Strong is beautiful
• A girl’s guide to choosing a kettlebell
• The toning problem: why women are missing out when it comes to weight training

Let’s break the false link between building muscle and becoming less feminine.

Women have muscles, it’s a physiological fact, and if we want to do anything useful or impressive with them and look sexy to boot, we’d better start training them!

Here is an incident that happened to me recently. I was talking to a bloke in the gym about the fact that I was training for strongwoman and I happened to mention that I would like to put on a couple of pounds of muscle.

He said, with a grimace, “Really? But you don’t want to lose your femininity, do you?”

So putting on a couple of pounds of muscle is going to make me lose my femininity, is it? This is typical of the casual ignorance displayed by many people about muscle building. I’m an athletic-looking size 10, I weigh 136 pounds. What difference is a couple of pounds of muscle distributed around my body going to make to my appearance? I doubt most people would even notice.

Me (right) and Caroline Pearce, aka ‘Ice’ from Gladiators. Note the tragic loss of femininity experienced by these two strength training females. Don’t let this be you!

I’m not trying to dictate what men or women find attractive. Long hair, cute bob, big tits, curvy, athletic, muscular, long legs, nice bum, spiky hair and tattoos, tanned and outdoorsy, pale and interesting… there are so many ways to look sexy and feminine.

A powerful woman needs powerful arms! I bet POTUS isn’t complaining…

Muscle, whether you realise it or not, plays a huge part in looking feminine. Pertness of bum? Gluteus maximus, baby! Shapeliness of calf? A toned gastrocnemius, of course. ‘Michelle Obama’ arms? Bi’s and tri’s my dears, not to mention the delts.

And you can’t build muscle using 3lb pink dumbbells. Your handbag weighs more than that! The weight’s gotta be heavy.

(Not convinced? Read Why lift weights? for a simple answer to that question.)

The truth is that for some people, any mention of muscle building is an automatic no-no. This merely reveals ignorance about the human body and the importance of muscle.

Although we can use muscle to scuplt particular parts of our bodies into nicer shapes, this isn’t the primary role of muscle.

In fact, everybody needs to be concerned about building muscle, since we spend most of our lives slowly losing it and becoming more and more frail.

Even this poor girl has muscles, but wouldn't you agree she could do with some more?

We all have muscle in the first place and we all need it in order to lead active, healthy lives. From the way some women talk, you’d think they didn’t even possess muscles!

But they do, and they are neglecting them because of this pernicious link.

For most people, building additional muscle doesn’t happen automatically, it has to be done deliberately (especially after your early twenties). What we do build automatically is fat. It’s very easy to get fatter, more difficult to build muscle.

But building muscle helps us to lose fat. Muscle burns more calories than fat, so the more of it we have, the more we can burn excess calories. Muscle also takes energy to be built in the first place, energy that would otherwise be stored as fat. This is true for both men and women.

These days most people want to look lean and athletic, with less fat. The way to do this is to build muscle but still in the eyes of many people this is only deemed acceptable for men. No wonder so many women spend years dieting unsuccessfully or acquire dangerous eating disorders that keep them weak, malnourished and either too skinny or too fat.

Why do guys like this picture?

So back to the guy who so baldly expressed his opinion on my femininity. Of course, we know what’s really going on here. We know that the image he has in his head is of a female pro-bodybuilder on stage under the lights with all the fake tan, dehydration, flexing and so on. He has equated this snapshot image (which doesn’t even reflect the everyday reality of a pro-bodybuilder, let alone anyone else) with general weight lifting of any kind undertaken by a woman – and moreover has decided that this is not what he finds attractive.

(Incidentally, there is an issue about people associating weight training with bodybuilding but not other sports. You might be talking about strongwoman or weightlifting, but it is the bodybuilder image that immediately appears in people’s minds and not, say, the slim and athletic Marilou Dozois-Prevost who graces the top of this post.)

What’s odd is that Random Gym Guy is quite admiring of my figure as it stands at the moment – a figure which has been developed over several years by muscle building and heavy weight training.

So there’s a serious disconnect between the evidence of his own eyes and his preconceptions and prejudices about ‘muscle building’ and ‘femininity’.

Apparently I have reached some mysterious boundary where I look good at the moment but if I build a smidgen more muscle I will suddenly turn into a she-hulk!

Two female bodybuilders: the difference is DRUGS, not lifting weights

With pictures like the one on the right, I guess it is not surprising that people get hugely distorted views about women and muscle. The media love to dwell on the ‘freak’ aspects of any activity but it is drugs not weights that are the cause. Just say no, kids.

(The original female bodybuilders still looked feminine. Read more here about what went wrong. Clue: it wasn’t lifting weights!)

Ironically many men will find particular bodies attractive that have been built by careful dieting and weight training – but they don’t realise it. This is about education, about breaking that seemingly automatic link between the desire to build muscle  – for health, looks, performance or whatever – and loss of femininity.

Allyson Goble, trainer at Bodytribe Fitness, tackled this thorny subject in our recent Women’s Strength Symposium. She comments that if masculinity is defined by strength and muscle building, does that mean that femininity must be the opposite: weakness and fat? Femininity = weakness? Surely we are past that in the 21st century.

The truth is that you can look very feminine (whatever that means to you) and also build muscle, lift heavy weights and generally enjoy yourself.

Here is some of the positive testimony from Allyson’s discussion.

Katydid: “As a person who has gone through challenges with eating disorders and body image for a very long time I’ve found weightlifting and being a powerlifter, and the resultant strength to be the best medicine in the world.”

Louisa: “Until I started weight training, with fantastic results (not only because my body shape improved but because I felt more confident and got a buzz out of it), I really didn’t believe how good it would be for me. I have never really worried about getting bulky. I know I look better and feel fitter than I have for over 20 years. However, people around me do ask if I’m not worried about bulking up. And I have struggled to get my husband to understand that I’m not going to end up looking like a female body builder on steroids.”

Allyson: “Girls deserve to have strong muscles and bones and ligaments and tendons, etc. AND look good in their undies too!”

The beautiful and be-six-packed Allyson Felix

Men care what you look like – they are visual creatures after all. But men also care what you think you look like.

Lack of confidence in your own looks is not sexy. Obsessing about whether your bum looks big is a real turn-off.  If you have a nice bum from squatting, be proud of it! If you have a great six pack from training and dieting, show it off. I am a big fan of the female six pack myself, I think it is super sexy!

So back to where I started. You might be wondering, ‘why do you care what Random Gym Guy thinks anyway?’

Well, I don’t, as he’s just some random guy down the gym. But what about the men who do matter in our lives? I know from discussions on the Women’s Strength Training Network that many women do have these issues with their other halves. We can’t just say ‘well I don’t care about your feelings’. But a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

Louisa, who was quoted above, says “I have struggled to get my husband to understand that I’m not going to end up looking like a female body builder on steroids.” Time will prove Louisa right, and perhaps her husband will get used to her having a bit more muscle than before.

I know that my perception of muscle on both men and women has changed, the more I have been around it, seen it, and most of all, experienced the amazing things you can do with it!

This is why I am committed to changing perceptions, and why I believe that eventually a cultural shift will occur and women will no longer be considered less feminine because they have muscles and can use them.

More from gubernatrix

Girls and Strength Training: Are We Able To Shift Our Perceptions? How Else Are We ‘ABLE’? By Allyson Goble

Women’s Strength Training Network

Strong is beautiful

The toning problem: why women are missing out when it comes to weight training

Squat workshop by gubernatrix (Photo: Kate Pankhurst)

Strength. It’s 99% about how strong you are.

I don’t know whether it’s the circles I move in, but I tend to meet people who are more concerned with how good their technique is than how much they are lifting.

These well-intentioned students of strength are the opposite end of the scale from the idiots in the gym who load the bar up with more weight than they can handle and then proceed to invite maiming with appalling technique and absolutely no understanding of basic safety. But as far as I know, none of those people reads this blog (though they should!).

I’m known for being generous where technique is concerned, not a stickler for the perfect position so long as people are reasonably safe. I am willing to entertain other opinions but I tend to think not ‘is my technique perfect?’ but ‘is my technique good enough’?

When I teach workshops, such as the squat workshop pictured above, I focus on technique and strength. When you’ve got the basic movement, it’s time to stick some more weight on the bar and challenge yourself.

I didn’t get into strength training to do pretty moves, although that’s part of the fun. But I got into it to lift ever heavier things – that’s my own personal buzz. Will I sacrifice technique to lift something heavier? Yes, sometimes. Not all the time, not every day. I’ll train sensibly and then go for it on the platform, for example.

And before you raise the hydra of injury – yep, been there. In fact I picked up an injury just a couple of weeks ago while deadlifting in a strongwoman competition. Am I annoyed I got injured? Yep. Do I regret going for that weight? Nope.

Strongman is an interesting sport since many of the events are performed using what most people would think of as bad technique – rounding the back in the atlas stones, hyperextending the lower back for the log press and so on. But strongmen train specifically to perform the events like this. It’s in the nature of odd object lifting. It’s part of what it means to be a strongman – being able to lift in some very awkward positions.

And for you functional fitness fans, this is vital. In an emergency situation, are you likely to be presented with a finely crafted eleiko-bar-shaped object to lift? Or is it more likely to be some awkwardly-shaped heavy bastard of a thing?

Try telling Laurence Shahlaei he should lift with his legs not his back

In a very technical sport such as olympic weightlifting, technique is vital in as much as it allows you to lift more. If you can’t snatch properly you’ll never snatch very much because there is a limit to the amount of weight you can get from the floor to overhead by just muscling it up there. If you don’t have the technique in olympic weightlifting then you just miss…and miss… and miss…

But can great technique be an aim in itself? Maybe, if that’s what turns you on. Maybe you want to have the most beautiful moves in the gym and you don’t care how heavy the weight is.

But you also have to think about how you are applying the technique. Are you applying it with confidence? Are you diving under that bar with complete commitment? Or did you start lifting and think ‘christ, that feels heavy!’

In other words, having perfect technique with a light weight may not mean jack shit once the weight gets challenging.

How much mental energy should you spend worrying about technique? What would happen if you stopped worrying about technique and put some more weight on the bar?

Many people seem to think that they are not ‘ready’ to add weight until they can perform a lift perfectly. It’s a combination of fear of injury, fear of the weight and the desire to practice with something easy. I know these feelings all too well!

But adding more weight teaches too. Adding more weight can in some circumstances actively improve technique (a big heavy weight can force you into the correct position) and in other circumstances simply make you work harder to get it right.

With sub-maximal weights, you can sometimes make adjustments during the lift to compensate for deficiencies in the technique – for example, not having quite the right starting position, or not catching the weight in exactly the right place. With a maximum or very close to maximum weight, if you don’t get it right, you’ll probably fail the lift. So you’ll know damn well when you do get it right.

There are some lifters who are known as good technicians. These are the jammy bastards whose technique is exactly the same, lift after lift, never really deteriorating (eventually the weight just gets too heavy). Realistically, most of us won’t have this talent.

So as with most things in life, there is a balance to be struck. You probably don’t want to end up on the wrong side of either opinion.

If you agonise about your technique, take some time out and just think about lifting more weight. Don’t forget that all that time you are spending on perfecting your technique is time that you are not spending getting stronger.

Conversely, if you chase the numbers every day and you are just desperate to put an extra few kilos on your lifts, consider that taking time to work on your technique might actually improve your numbers in the long run.

For the vast majority of us, our technique could always be better but in strength sports, you don’t get points for style. If we allow this thought to paralyse us, we may not make progress or get stronger.

So where do you stand on the technique debate?

More from gubernatrix

gubernatrix on squat technique
Paralysis by analysis
Mystery of the squat

There are different philosophies of what a training community looks like these days (perhaps there always have been). Aside from the commercial chain gym model, with which most of us are familiar, a few others emerge.

Shaolin Temple
There are gyms who proclaim the fact that they are private by design, that you can only train there if you can prove yourself in some way. What goes on inside is not to be revealed or only to be revealed in limited ways. A well known example is Gym Jones:

“Our culture, dedicated to The Art of Suffering, is both safety net and inspiration. Individuals push hard and risk more alongside trustworthy peers. To maintain this spirit we choose clients who resonate with it. Gym Jones is private, but not closed.”
- Mark Twight, Gym Jones

Locals only
There are other clubs or gyms which are private simply by dint of not publicising themselves and not being particularly interested in attracting new audiences. The logic goes that if people are interested enough, they’ll find them.

These tend to be gyms who are not on the information superhighway and prefer to foster their community locally, in person. Expertise is handed down from lifter to lifter, rather than being read in books or on the internet.

Hyper-connected
Then there is the model of putting it all out there, like the Crossfit affiliates who post pictures of every workout and the results of every training session. This may also encompass creating videos, articles, podcasts and other media detailing training methods, rules, advice and examples.

CrossFit is noteworthy for its use of a virtual community Internet model. The company says this de-centralized approach shares some common features with open source software projects and allows best practices to emerge from a variety of approaches
- CrossFit’s Wikipedia entry

And there are a whole load of organisations occupying places along the spectrum, or combining elements of each.

What kind of model do you prefer and why? What do you make of accusations of ‘elitism’ or ‘cult-ishness’? Does every training community have a duty to be inclusive? Should anyone even care what ethos a particular gym adopts?

Symposium – a meeting or conference for the public discussion of some topic especially one in which the participants form an audience and make presentations

Gubernatrix is hosting an online symposium on women and strength training on March 8th, 2010, which is also International Women’s Day. You can access the symposium here, pre-register on the forum and introduce yourself. The symposium itself opens on 8th March.

Strongwoman Joan Rhodes chucks a man over her head for fun (photo from Life magazine)

The purpose of this symposium is to share experiences, generate ideas and inspire people to take action – to change perceptions of women’s strength, bust myths, get more women lifting heavy and generally break down barriers to strength training for women.

How will the symposium work?

I have invited several writers/strength athletes to compose a ‘think piece’ on a particular issue or challenge, to generate discussion.

These will be posted at the top of the forum thread for people to discuss within the thread. People may want to start new threads if discussions seem to be taking off in a certain direction. It’s up to you the participants to decide where you want the discussions to go.

What’s the big issue?

As most of you know, I have been lifting heavy weights for years, as a powerlifter, olympic weightlifter and even strongwoman.

But in the ten years I have been lifting I have seen very little progress in attitudes towards women strength training. The same myths about ‘getting bulky’ persist, year after year; women are still given bad advice in gyms and magazines; the free weights area is still an intimidating environment for most women.

I know that there are many women out there who would not only benefit from lifting heavy things but would really enjoy it too. I want to find ways to make weight training more accessible for women.

Understanding the issues

Putting the issues out there in a discussion forum should lead to some real insights into what motivates women with regard to training, strength, muscle, personal empowerment.

Of course you don’t have to be a woman to benefit from this kind of discussion – or indeed to take part! Since strength training is so male dominated, men are a very important part of the discussion and can have an immensely positive impact. Guys, we look forward to your input.

Taking action

I am lucky enough to have access to an incredible resource, women across the globe who are having fun and getting stronger, defying convention and forging their own paths. I have met you through this blog and through the Women’s Strength Training Network I set up on Facebook.

I hope this symposium encourages people to put their heads above the parapet and make a small difference in their communities. This could involve anything from encouraging friends to start lifting, to starting an all-women lifting group, writing about strength training, running workshops or even just be able to explain to people how beneficial and empowering strength training can be and cut through all the negative perceptions.

So do come along and take part at http://gubernatrix.co.uk/forum. You can drop in on 8th March at any time and join in the discussions. You will also be able to access the forum in the days following the symposium to see what was said and to continue the debate.