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.

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems”
- Mahatma Gandhi

Getting stronger and fitter is an immensely powerful and rewarding process on a personal level. We can take that energy and ability and use it for even greater good and I am keen to explore – with you – ways of doing that.

Transition to what?

We are living in an age of transition, between a wasteful, energy-dependent, over-consumptive age and …well, we don’t quite know yet, but some kind of fall of civilisation is approaching – in fact it is probably already here.

As my favourite crash philosopher Ran Prieur comments, “It won’t be like falling off a cliff, more like rolling down a rocky hill. There won’t be any clear before, during, or after. Most people living during the decline and fall of Rome didn’t even know it.”

But what do we know? That food shortages, energy shortages, extreme weather, financial crises and massive migrations of people are just a few of the challenges we will be facing – are already facing – in the near future.

Those in charge tell us that if the system breaks down we will get anarchy and chaos, but in fact when the system fails us we tend to move closer together, create communities and find innovative ways to meet challenges.

This new society will require us to be more skilful, practical, adaptable and resilient. Physical strength and fitness is an important part of this resilience and the ability to cope with the inevitable changes (or improvements, if you prefer) in our lifestyle.

“…life will change less than the peak oilers are predicting, because we have so much room to cut out waste: to drive less often in more efficient cars, ride bicycles, turn off the heat and air conditioning, take the machines and industrial chemicals out of agriculture, stop flying food around the world. Gradually, more people will grow their own food, raise their own kids, tend their own health, do stuff with their own bodies instead of machines, and turn their attention from the stock market and TV characters to their more real lives. Those who can adjust mentally will recognize this as an improvement.”
- Ran Prieur

The functional fitness model is particularly well suited to a post-peak oil world: there’s no reliance on machines or heavy energy use; tools are homemade, equipment is simple; the movements are applicable to real life tasks; in fact the entire approach is about being strong and healthy, not just looking good.

Functional fitness tends to take place in small scale businesses such as garage gyms, involving local communities. There’s an emphasis on learning new skills, helping others and making progress, not an obsession with things being so easy that you switch off completely or simply follow like an automaton what an instructor tells you to do.

“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.”
-    Mark Rippetoe

Functional fitness gives people strength, ability, confidence and independence from large scale systems, all of which are needed to build a new type of society. For me, functional fitness is strength. Strength is more important than endurance in a transitional age. I’d rather have the ability to pick up heavy, awkward objects than trot for ten miles.

I’m not dissing cardio endurance entirely, it all goes into the mix. But I’ve reached the point where the sight of millions of people fruitlessly pounding the pavements, who can’t even carry the equivalent of their own bodyweight across a car park, makes me want to jump up and down and possibly set myself on fire. Why hark back to a distant hunter-gatherer tradition when we don’t even have the ‘dad strength’ or ‘mum strength’ of the second world war generation?

Specialisation in terms of energy systems (long slow distance) is as counter-productive as any other type of specialisation. If you can run, that is fantastic. Now take the logical next step: pick up something heavy and run with that.

New challenges

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
- Dr. Howard Thurman

There is a transition that takes place, from pursuing physical fitness for purely selfish motives to thinking about wider, altruistic motives. Selfish motives are a perfectly good place to start – perhaps it is even necessary to go through a self-centered process in order to get completely comfortable with your physicality (my friends at Bodytribe have examined this issue in the past), but I don’t think that’s where it ends.

Having identified functional fitness, and strength in particular, as being ideal attributes for the new world we are living in, how do we join all these new ideas together? How do we start to make a difference to our communities? If you have a passion for strength and fitness and if you care about what happens in and to our world, why not use the former to help the latter?

It can be as simple as doing a workout in aid of an issue you care about: my friends at Crossfit Reading organised a sponsored workout for Haiti last weekend. Or it can be a longer term project running low cost training sessions for the local community, like Chip Conrad does in Sacramento.

There are a number of issues that have caught my eye over the years and I want to start personally making a difference in these areas.

1. Strength bias

Governments and local authorities think they are making great strides in ‘health and wellbeing’, but from what I can see there is very little emphasis on resistance/strength training and functional fitness, and far too much emphasis on high impact cardio and – for want of a better term – pointless jigging about.

I’m part of FK.UK, an umbrella organisation for functional fitness in the UK and I hope that we can influence the agenda by making sure that sound and trustworthy information about strength training gets to as wide an audience as possible.

2. Strength equality

There’s still a real issue around social inclusion and strength ‘equality’. For anyone who isn’t a policy wonk, that means making sure that people who are disadvantaged or marginalised can still get the benefits of better strength and fitness. The functional fitness world appears to be very much a white middle class male pursuit at the moment – shouldn’t we take active steps to change this?

Strength in particular is a gender equality issue. Women haven’t had the same access to strength training that men have, nor is it nearly as socially acceptable for women to be strong as it is for men – and there’s no good reason why this should be the case. Quite frankly, we need all the strong people we can get!

Fitness professionals and governments alike persist in giving out wrong information to women about strength training. I’ve recently set up the Women’s Strength Training Network on Facebook to help combat this by supporting women who are already strength training and generate new ideas about how to get the messages out to a wider audience.

3. Sustainable food

It is important to link healthy eating with sustainable food and farming. Personally I put ready meals and battery farmed chicken in the same ‘utter crap’ category. I’ve stopped eating meat because I just don’t trust it any more. Even if you are careful only to buy free range chicken at the supermarket, for example, what happens when you go out to a restaurant – do you check the provenance of the meat there? I thought it was easier not to eat it at all.

The food industry is now so global, mechanised and industrialised that it is no longer possible to be a responsible citizen and ignore the politics of food production. Food and farming are a big part of climate change (impact of livestock farming on carbon emissions and potential food shortages due to the effects of climate change being two examples), environmental damage, animal welfare, people welfare (fair trade). Food security is as big a concern as energy security but the solutions are likely to come from communities getting together and deciding to do something about it.

So I want to know what you think about all of this. Do you link your fitness with broader aspirations in your life, and if so, how? Are there particular issues that the strength community can contribute to? How do you shape not just a new person but a new world?

Yes I know it’s another hoary old chestnut but there’s a reason why: it’s a fascinating, annoying, intriguing, frustrating, astonishing, awkward and curious topic.

The issue of performance enhancing drugs has popped up again because of the World Athletics Championships (which I have been glued to all week since I am off work), but it is never far from the world of sports, especially strength sports.

Bigger Stronger Faster

If you haven’t seen the movie Bigger Stronger Faster yet watch it here or view the trailer here.

It is a very intelligently made documentary by Chris Bell about the use of anabolic steroids. Bell comes across largely as a seeker after truth, not someone pushing a particular agenda. His own family’s involvement with steroids makes it all the more engaging.

What I found interesting about the documentary is not so much effects on the individuals who take performance-enhancing drugs (although these stories are compelling) but the effect on society as a whole – particularly American society. In fact the subtitle of the film is The side effects of being American.

It is thought-provoking to see just how many people and organisations have an interest in the existence of heroes and super humans. How much we desire records to be broken and amazing feats to be undertaken. How much money there is to be made, glory to be attained, dreams to be realised…

Human cost

…and broken. Because the other aspect the documentary clearly shows is the effect on ordinary people who often become the victims. It’s not just winners who take drugs – it is other people who want to emulate them.

T-Muscle published an interview with an anonymous ‘drug coach’ from the bodybuilding/physique world which sets this out pretty starkly.

“It used to be guys wanted to know what they could do in the gym or in the kitchen to be better on stage. Now it seems the goal is to see how much gear they can shove in the pin.”

I was pretty shocked at the world that was described in this article. I’m aware of training strategies and eating strategies and I know more or less what these look like. But I suppose in my naivety I assumed drug use to be a case of just popping a few pills every day…

Powerlifting is another sport with which it seems drugs will be forever associated. I don’t know how it got to this stage. I belong to a federation that has to explicitly say in the title that it is drug free, just so everyone understands this up front!

The future?

If everyone’s on drugs, isn’t it a level playing field again? What about genetic manipulation? If it isn’t happening already, presumably very soon someone will find a way of altering genetic structure to improve performance. As one scientist says in Bigger Stronger Faster, “what we call talent is simply genetic variation”.

What do you think? Is it inevitable that every record breaker is on drugs? Can we ever get rid of drugs in sport? Or should we redraw the line and say use of drugs is inevitable? How about the ordinary people down the gym who are using drugs to help them attain their dream?

Photo by latvian

I am interested to know whether competition and competitiveness is a part of your training and approach to training.

It seems to differ greatly from person to person. There are many types of competitiveness – against yourself, against friends, against the whole world. And if you do see yourself as ‘competitive’, you may have different reasons for this: you might want to dominate and achieve, or simply exorcise some demons or challenge yourself.

Do you think competitiveness is a good thing? If you are a trainer, do you try to encourage it? Perhaps you think it is unnecessary, maybe even a negative influence?

Share your thoughts below!

Olympic weightlifting from the Elite Fitness Manual

Specific vs general is a popular argument in fitness circles and can often get quite technical. But I think that for anyone who isn’t a professional athlete, it doesn’t matter terribly whether you train for something specific or for general fitness. Which mode you choose depends on your personality.

Some people respond to the challenge of training for an event, or acquiring a new skill and will therefore thrive on specificity. Some people train because they want to feel fit, look good or have fun and thrive on variety and balance.

Some people do a bit of both: train for an event some of the time, and train for fun the rest of the time.

I’m in the first category. I like to train for specific sports and skills, but I like to do several at a time. It’s multi-specificity, if that makes sense.

I know that by training several sports at once, I lose out on some of the benefits of dedicating myself to one sport. But I also gain from the crossover of benefits between one activity and another. For example I am better at indoor rowing because of my powerlifting background. My endurance is not as good as that of the other girls but I have a more powerful leg drive. Sometimes this difference results in me winning.

You could say that all things being equal, an athlete will do better in one sport if they dedicate themselves to it. But all things are not equal, not for most of us who aren’t professional athletes. We have a relatively small amount of time to train and how we use that time most effectively will differ from person to person.

It is not just time, we also have a certain amount of will, patience, tolerance, mental energy and belief. How we apportion these things, in training and in life in general will significantly affect what success we have in our chosen sports or activities.

I can’t be the best powerlifter I can be by only doing powerlifting. It doesn’t work like that for me, even though it might for someone else. It is part of my personality type to enjoy learning new skills and to thrive on making connections, so restricting me to one skill isn’t going to stimulate my abilities. To another person this might seem like madness!

I also think that one’s goals and ambitions are very much shaped by personality; whether, for example, you have clear idea in your mind of where you want to get to (in which case, specificity might work for you) or whether you are more comfortable living in the moment and being ready for anything (in which case a general programme could be ideal). Of course, living in the moment doesn’t mean being directionless. But it might mean that your goals evolve more gradually and organically.

Yoga by listenmissy

What does this all mean for training? It means that an understanding and acceptance of what kind of person you are helps you to make better choices when it comes to training aims and programmes.

It is easy to beat yourself up because you can’t follow someone else’s programme or emulate their dedication. This is not meant to be a get-out clause for the lazy. A bit of soul-searching should tell you whether your failure was down to not being bothered or whether it just really didn’t suit you.

It’s like being a parent struggling to find that thing that will unlock their child’s imagination or abilities. You can apply this process to yourself and when you find it, it will be so exciting!

What do you think? How important is personality in training? Is it something you take into account?

Further information about personality types

More from gubernatrix

• What is functional fitness?
• Boost your motivation
• How to be a better version of yourself
• What’s your food personality?

Photo credit: Murdoch

The one thing that all the good training manuals say, but all the magazines don’t say, is that diet and training programmes must be individualised. We all start from a different basis of genetics, experience, capacity for work, personalities and lifestyles.

Magazines would prefer you to think that a celebrity’s diet or training programme can work the same way for you as it sells more magazines, but this is complete rubbish.

Some celebrities can seem to be more successful than so-called ordinary people at losing weight or getting ripped. But this is not because they are using some magic programme, this is because they are able to afford a highly individualised programme and have the energy and motivation to devote to it.

The fact is that you can also enjoy the same success if you employ these same principles: a programme designed around your needs and goals, a diet based on your lifestyle and approach to eating, plus the motivation to do it all properly – which comes from within you.

There are many ways to obtain these things. You can get expert help, by hiring a personal trainer and nutritionist. You can get support and advice by joining a diet or fitness club. You can design a diet and training programme yourself, by doing the research and teaching yourself the principles.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each route. You might think that hiring a personal trainer and nutritionist is the best route if you can afford it, but this is not necessarily the case. Learning it all yourself, while it might take longer, could be better for you in the long run. Over your lifetime, the knowledge that you have gained can be accessed for free at any time because it is in your head!

Celebrity culture

This is one of the most insidious and destructive aspects of modern (mostly) Western society. Celebrity culture can destroy people. It is vitally important that people stop wanting to look like celebrities and start wanting to look like a better version of themselves. For Christ’s sake, even celebrities don’t want to look like themselves! How many celebrities have you seen with wildly fluctuating weight, cosmetic surgery and drug use?

No-one could deny that looks are important to the majority of people but you should decide what you think looks good.

I believe it comes down to having respect for yourself as an individual. There is nothing wrong with wanting to change; in fact, this is often a very positive desire. But the focus must be on yourself and how you want yourself to look. Don’t picture a celebrity, picture a better version of yourself.

Can anyone lose weight? Yes. Can anyone put on muscle? Yes. But it may not happen in the way you think it is going to. You will learn a lot about yourself while going through the process and sometimes you will have to be realistic about your goals.

This is another reason why it is dangerous to have a celebrity as a model for your ideal look. It simply may not be possible for you to look like that. You may look great but in a different way. Always focus on the way you look.

Cutting through the crap

Not everyone wants to spend hours learning about training and nutrition in order to be able to create their own personalised programme. But you have to take responsibility for these things to a certain extent.

It is like healthy eating. You don’t have to go back to school and get a nutrition qualification but you should learn the basics and be able to make good choices when you go shopping. You must immunise yourself against marketing claims. Read the nutritional information but do not take any notice of unquantified and vague claims like “low fat” or “whole grain”, which mean nothing.

Trust your instincts. This is part of having respect for yourself and your own capacity to understand what is good and what is bad. I see people all the time getting terribly confused about what is the ‘right’ training programme or the ‘right’ type of food to eat. This is because they are desperately trying to remember what they read in a magazine or what someone told them they should be doing.

If you find yourself in this position, stop trying to remember what someone else said and try to work it out for yourself. This is not as difficult as it sounds.

Here are some simple questions to ask yourself:

1. Are outrageous or unrealistic claims being made? Come on, you know you can’t achieve anything worthwhile in 10 minutes, right? If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it and everyone would be showing amazing results.
2. Do the numbers add up? Often one particular number will be trumpeted, but check all the others to see if it actually makes sense. For example, 1% fat – but how much sugar? Unless it is a raw ingredient, too much of anything is likely to be suspect.
3. Is it adaptable? Anything that is not adaptable to the individual should make you pause and consider. Very few things in life work in the same way for everyone. If adaptability is not built in, you can’t be sure it will work for you. It may be perfectly acceptable for matey over there but not for you.
4. Is the product or service playing on your fears or uncertainties? Be suspicious of anything that plays on your fears or depicts disastrous scenarios if you don’t partake of it. This is usually marketing rubbish.
5. Don’t assume that if something is right then everything else is wrong! This may sound unintuitive but it comes back to taking an individualised approach. For example, some people say you must eat breakfast, others say you don’t have to eat breakfast. There are scenarios where these are both right! So how do you tell the difference? Well, just be careful of absolutes. There are very few absolutes in life. If someone is telling you that you absolutely must do something, this may not be true. You are under no obligation to accept this without question just because someone chose to use strong language!
6. Be suspicious of claims of “best” and “only”. The truth is that lots of things work. This is great news, it means that you can choose a method that works for you. Ultimately the only thing that is important is that it does work.

You’ll probably catch 90% of the crap just by going through this simple thought process.

The breakfast example

Let’s look at this more closely because it is an interesting one. If two seemingly opposite things are both right, how do you work out which is right for you?

The most thorough way would be to do a controlled experiment of both methods – but we don’t all have time to do that!

So you can take a shortcut (oh,  and be suspicious of anyone who offers shortcuts!) by finding out the reasons behind the methods and deciding if those apply to you; in other words forming a hypothesis about which is more likely to be best, based on your knowledge of yourself – a topic on which you are a world expert.

In the breakfast example, the conventional wisdom is that eating a healthy breakfast is better than not because it stops you snacking and eating unhealthy food later in the day because you got hungry.

However there are also people who say it doesn’t matter what time you eat and how many times a day you eat, so long as you are eating healthy or ‘clean’ food and you are getting the right amount of calories or macronutrients in a given period of time. These people are often following an ‘intermittent fasting’ style of eating.

In each method, the desired outcome of controlling overall calories is the same and the principle of eating healthy food is the same. It is simply the tactic that is different. One tactic to avoid overeating is to eat at regular intervals, the other tactic to avoid overeating is not to eat for long periods of time.

In either case, eating unhealthy food or eating more than the required number of calories would constitute failure.

So you need to pick the tactic that you think would work for you, given your circumstances. Or try both and see which is best.

What I am saying is that there is nothing inherent in ‘breakfast’ that makes you healthier or thinner. This is why you need to find out what is behind the claims that people make. Remember, there are very few absolutes in life.

Conclusion

Photo credit: burntfilm

At the risk of sounding like a self help guru I believe the key to success is: learn, aspire, believe.

If you want to be slimmer, fitter and healthier, learn about 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.

Aspire to be a better version of yourself, not to be someone else. Aspiration is important because true aspirations generally start with being honest about yourself. Aspiring to be better comes from an understanding of where you are now. People who have no aspirations are perhaps kidding themselves about their current situation.

Believe in your ability to cut through the crap and make decisions for yourself. Believe in your ability to carry out a programme of work and get the outcome you want. Right this moment I am watching the Williams sisters playing in the Wimbledon final and I can see right in front of me the difference made by belief. They are both brilliant tennis players – you can’t choose between them where ability is concerned. But Serena has more belief right now and she is winning.

So go on, make it happen!

More from gubernatrix

• Are you self-conscious?
• What’s your food personality?
• What lengths do you go to for your training?
• Boost your motivation
• Life’s too short

All power to you, I admire you!

Me however, I get embarrassed. I often feel self-conscious about what I’m doing and worry about what other people will think, particularly when everyone else around me is doing something completely different.

Yep, I feel silly

There’s an example from just this week. Having failed to get up early one day in order to train before work, I decided to do the workout at lunchtime instead. The office I work in houses around 500 people and has a large field out back. This is a lovely grassy area that is kept well mown, with benches around the side – perfect for training. Oh yes, and it is also in full view of the staff canteen and several floors of offices!

All morning I was trying to imagine myself training out there but all I could think of was how embarrassing it would be for my colleagues to see me, stumbling around all hot and sweaty trying to grind out burpees and squat jumps. They wouldn’t know what I was doing or why (how many people really understand the demands of a gold standard burpee if they’ve never done one?) and I was convinced that, far from looking impressively athletic, I’d just look like a pathetic lump throwing myself about.

Yes, these really were my thoughts!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I decided to get out there and do it anyway. The alternative option of getting in my car and driving 20 minutes to the local park when there was a perfectly acceptable field right outside the door was too ridiculous to contemplate. (Although I did in fact contemplate it. At length). Not to mention the waste of petrol and carbon emissions just to assuage my fragile ego! So the office field it was.

As I started to jog around the field to warm up, I got that familiar feeling of excitement mixed with trepidation and by the time I had started my circuit I was definitely having fun – in a painful, sweaty sort of way.

I no longer cared about the girls on the benches with their sandwiches or the maintenance guys smoking cigarettes by the delivery bay. All I could think about was, “I’m the one getting fitter here. Whatever I look like right now, I’ll look awesome in a few weeks’ time!”

Working out in strange environments or doing something a bit different takes a small, private act of bravery. When trying an exercise for the first time, you are afraid of screwing up and looking like an idiot. When going all-out in an intense circuit you know you are going to look a bit crazy. This is all very well if you are surrounded by people doing the same thing. But if you are the only one, it can feel very exposed.

This also applies to any women who regularly find that they are the only female in the gym. Guys will look, they can’t help it. But it can be hard to block this out and just get on with your workout. It’s not as if we are bouncing along at 5 miles an hour on the treadmill with not a hair out of place. We’re under the bar pushing bodyweight or more and it doesn’t always look pretty!

Once I was doing near-max squats when my tracksuit trousers ripped up the back with what seemed to me to be deafening noise. I would have died of embarrassment had I not had almost 100kg on my back at the time.

But if you care about training and you care about results, you have to learn to put these thoughts to the back of your mind. Almost everyone feels self-conscious at some point, but only some people let it hold them back.

Once you learn not to care about what others might think, an amazing thing happens: you find you can do anything!

And here’s another truth: those wonderful exercise endorphins you feel when you train don’t just reduce pain, they also make you feel great about yourself. But you have to be exercising in order to get them. Sitting around worrying won’t make you feel good.

So today’s lesson is: screw up your courage and go for it because you are the one who is benefiting.

I’ll leave you with some inspiration I saw on Ross Enamait’s blog:

Rocky training montage – even Rocky can look kinda silly doing bunny hops with a piece of wood across his shoulders. But who wouldn’t want to train with this intensity and belief?

Large fella on a bike – read this amazing story about how one guy conquered his fear and laziness and made an enormous difference to his life