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 [...]

All the fabulous photos by Helen Armstrong Earlier this year I was approached by a young woman called Chantelle who had been lifting weights for a few years, loved it and now wanted to share her passion for lifting heavy things with other women. Chantelle wanted to set up a series of weight training workshops [...]

Enter the symposium here. 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 [...]

Folks, I have started a group on Facebook called the Women’s Strength Training Network. I hope many of you will join it. It is independent of this website, although clearly there’s a lot of synergy in the content. The aim is fourfold: Be a source of support for women who are ‘out there’ strength training, [...]

One of the nice things about going to national or international drug free powerlifting meets is that I get to catch up with the other female lifters. There aren’t many of us and we are scattered around the country. It’s mainly at competitions where we can renew our acquaintance and watch each other lift. I [...]

An essay on strength training as if people mattered. I love strength training. You know it, but I’ll say it anyway, I bloody love it. It’s one of the most happy, positive things in my life. I like knowing I’m strong and I’m only getting stronger. Why the sudden strength affirmation? Well a number of things [...]

Choosing the right weight of kettlebell is easy. Think about the basic moves you will be doing. The reality is that you will probably need one bell to swing and one to press and snatch.

I have been to many circuit classes in my time and in every class the women are allowed to do ‘girly push ups’ – push ups on your knees. This is fine for beginners and it is a fact of life that the vast majority of women, myself included, start off with a real disadvantage [...]

  Alex Puccio on A Maze of Death v12 from Bishop Bouldering Many people are turning to indoor climbing for fitness. They may, or may not have ambitions to climb regularly on rock but the indoor climbing environment is a fun adjunct to a gym routine. Rock climbing however is quite technique dependent. I meet [...]

I have lost count of the number of women who say to me, “I don’t want to do weight lifting, I just want to tone up a bit.” I am sure that many of you have heard the same sort of thing and as people who understand the benefits of weight training you want to [...]