Women, Strength and "Bulk"

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about women and lifting. As a lady committed to getting stronger by picking up heavy things and putting them down, this is a natural state of affairs. I'm sure this will be a recurring theme as I continue to think through these issues in my own life and in the lives of the women around me, and as I walk daily past the rows of women on treadmills and ellipticals on my way to the squat rack, the only XX-chromosome in the weight room 9 days out of 10.

Why Don't More Women Lift?

I was browsing a fitness message board this morning when a link to the Marie Claire article "Secrets of the Super Fit" caught my eye. As a feminist with a women's college education behind me, I knew what to expect: women's fashion/lifestyle magazines are ideal-to-the-point-of-clichéd sites for Womens Studies 101-style media analysis. Pink type saying something counterproductive, with vague body-hatred masquerading as "expert advice?" Nothing novel there. What I wasn't expecting was such a direct, unapologetic message about idealized norms for womens' bodies.

If you can't read the caption, the direct link is here. The caption is so rich it's worth posting in toto:

Don't bulk up!  Tracy Anderson, who trains Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, doesn’t believe in repetition or straining your muscles, as this can bulk you up. ‘Alternate running, skipping and galloping through the park to work different muscle groups.’ She also suggests cardio dance classes – or just  go clubbing (without drinking alcohol!) - which are more fun than regular exercise and work the muscle groups professional dancers use to become long and lean.

**Rolls up my sleeves:** Listen, Marie Claire.
 
1) Gwenyth Paltrow and Madonna are probably lovely women, but they are not "super fit." Super low body fat? Sure. Probably pretty good at hot-room yoga? Absolutely. But if we're going to talk about petite blond ladies who are "super fit," let's focus on, say, a Marilou Dozois-Prévost--101lb Olympic lifter--who is known for her outstanding fitness accomplishments rather than for starring in Shallow Hal. And actually, Ms. Paltrow is suffering from osteopenia, which is a direct consequence of her lack of care for her body. Her nutrition and training regimens are failing to make her healthy, and are succeeding only in keeping her fragile and tiny, well on her way to avian bone syndrome.

2) Tracy Anderson is doing a disservice to Ms. Paltrow, Madonna and anyone reading this article. I call bullshit on "not straining your muscles" lest you "bulk up." First of all, yoga is repetitive muscle-straining. Running is repetitive muscle-straining. Galloping is repetitive muscle-straining. Saying you should find a way to work out without doing any repetitive muscle-straining is an oxymoron, and can only serve to confuse and frustrate folks who are just beginning a new routine. And limiting "weight training" to nothing more than 3lb dumbbells? You lift more than that carrying groceries! No one following this advice would get "super fit," unless your idea of fitness is brittle bones and malnutrition. Ms. Anderson should be ashamed of herself for distributing harmful misinformation under the guise of expert advice.

3) Skipping and galloping? Am I a fucking baby horse? (Answer: yes. I am secretly a baby horse. I sure hope I don't get bulky!) Is this article honestly advocating adult women go galloping in parks? (I'm in, but only if I get to dress like this.)

4) Regular exercise is fun. Play is fun too, but framing "regular exercise" as a chore is doing favors to no one.

5) Why long and lean? Isn't the average ideal a little more curvy than that? I earnestly don't understand the bulk-hate. I'm not trying to set any norms on womens' bodies here--long and lean is great, but so is dense and strong. Gina Carano or Lidia Valentin (for example) aren't working towards "long, lean muscles," and they look amazing and perform amazing physical feats. God bless them for it.

"Toned" vs  "Bulky:" A Terrible Trap Keeping Women Weak

Let's walk around this circular problem. The language used--in marketing materials towards women in fitness, by popular trainers, by women themselves--around women wanting to get in shape is that we should want to be "toned but not bulky." Toned is a gendered fitness word; when women say they want to be toned, they mean they want to see a tiny bit of muscle definition and lose weight. In more universal language, what they are aiming for is reduced percent body fat. This is best accomplished in the kitchen, not in the gym; there's a well worn phrase, you can't outrun a bad diet. Running or lifting or any physical activity will help keep your metabolism stable (lifting helps best, since it spikes your metabolism for the full day), but losing body fat is all about eating. So, say you successfully lose some body fat. Here is the trap: if you see "too much" muscle definition, or if you have muscle mass and above 18% body fat, then you risk being too "bulky." Trainer/blogger Leigh Peele wrote a compelling essay here, with this follow up on the topic. While all of these definitions are relative--I might have a different idea of what "bulky" is compared with, say, Ms Anderson--but they relatively mean the same thing.

Here's the catch:

"Toned" is a lie. It is a horrible framework for defining your goals, and is too tied up in body-hatred to be a productive model for physical transformation, if physical transformation is your goal. The lie behind "toned" is that you say you want to do work to change your body, but if you change your body successfully (by getting strong, adding muscle mass, losing body fat) then you will find yourself in a new category for hating yourself. This is an unproductive, unacceptable framework.

At its core, this is about embodied gender. People take care of their bodies for a huge spectrum of reasons: to be more physically capable in their daily life; to accomplish a specific training goal, like running a triathlon or holding an iron cross; to stave off chronic illness; or, not unimportantly, just to "look good," to feel confident, to feel attractive. One of the comments Leigh Peele highlights in her article on bulk, found in message boards discussing a photograph of Madonna's and Kate Gosselin's visibly muscular shoulders and biceps, stands out:

"No thanks, not for me.
I like my women to be female.
Yep."

This sentiment is at the core of the bulk-hate: to be "overly" muscular is to be masculine, and the physical-transformation ideal of many women is to maintain a feminine physique. Transgressing this embodied boundary is threatening to some folks, at least to the commentators on the above linked photograph. (I'm not saying that femininity is everyone's ideal, or goal. Many men and women are most attracted to androgyny--butch ladies of the world unite!) So let's ask the question directly: does lifting make women more androgynous, masculine-looking, overly muscular or "bulky"?

Weight Training (Power Lifting/Olympic Lifting) vs. Body Building

I think some of the resistance (har har) against lifting comes from a mistaken conflation of weight training and body building. Below are three Olympic lifters from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, among the strongest women and most elite athletes in the world:

Lisa Rumbewas of Indonesia; Huang Huan of China; Marilou Dozois-Prevost of Canada

Compare with the bodybuilders below, the top 3 placeholders for 2010 IFBB Ms. International:

Iris Kyle, Yaxeni Oriquen-Garcia, Debi Laszewski

Their training goals are completely different. Olympic lifters train to maximize strength; they eat to gain muscle density and train hard. Body fat and aesthetic concerns are not part of the equation. Bodybuilders on the other hand train towards a specifically aesthetic goal, using weight training, a very carefully controlled diet to achieve unsustainably low % body fat, extreme and often unsafe dehydration levels, and (ahem) hormonal supplements to gain a competitive physique.

Assuming that you are going to go into a gym, lift some weights, and end up looking like Ms. International is delusional at best and, frankly, insulting to the rigorous, hyper-controlled work these women had to do to attain extreme physiques.

Let's assume that the majority of women in the world will neither train enough to join an Olympic team, nor put their body through the roller coaster required of competitive body building. While we're on the topic of aesthetics, what does a "normal" lady look like after sticking with a weight training regime?

Here are the ladies at 70s Big, after squatting enough to tear the bottom out of their pants. Here is my lady-lifting-idol from Stumptuous, demonstrating squat technique (and some body-transformations of other fans of hers, here). Here is "Iceland Annie" clean & jerking a phenomenal 200lbs.

They look healthy, strong and confident. That is attractive.

What Lifting ACTUALLY Does, and Why Everyone (I'm looking at the ladies) Should Lift 

Hopefully I've established that committed strength training--even lifting with enough dedication to qualify for a spot on an Olympic Lifting team--will not make women "bulky." So what does it do?**

(**I think this is a good time to define my terms a little more carefully. I do not mean using "weight machines" in a gym. These are all but useless for practical strength, since they train muscles in isolation instead of in conjunction with stabilizing muscles. When I say "lift," I mean dynamic, full-body lifts: squat, dead lift, bench press, standing press, pull up, push up, clean, kettlebell swing.)

The below list is taken with gratitude from this article on T-Nation (the link is relatively NSFW, with large photographs of half-naked bodybuilders in the margins):

1. Reduced risk of osteoporosis in later years: The mechanical stress placed on the body structure during strength training (especially ground-based movements) will help increase bone density and prevent calcium loss and bone frailty in latter years.  (From another article on why women need to weight train heavy: “Another reason women need to lift weights is to maintain bone density. Any women reading this who are over 40 years old have probably been emphatically prescribed copious amounts of calcium by their doctor. What the doc neglected to consider is the lack of stimulus necessary for your body to use valuable energy to build more bone. Maybe you should drop off a bunch of lumber in your doctor’s yard without mentioning why, and then get mad at him when he doesn’t use it to build a deck. He’s playing the same game with your body. Why would your body assume that you need more bone density if you never bear loads that would necessitate a stronger frame?”)
2. Reduced risk of sport injuries: While women are no more prone to weight-training injuries than men, it's true that women who practice sports are often more prone to injury than their male counterparts. But this is probably because, by tradition, men have been involved in a more serious off-season strength training regimen, which can help reduce the risk of injuries. A woman who is heavily involved in sports has a much lesser chance of being injured if she trains seriously in the gym.
3. Switch in body composition: With proper strength training a woman will add more lean body mass and will lose fat mass. Furthermore, including serious strength training while dieting down prevents loss of muscle and as a result will prevent the "yo-yo" effect of regaining all the lost weight and then some!
4. More strength to use in daily chores or sport activities: If women gain strength in the muscles involved in their daily tasks, they'll have to use a lesser proportion of their available strength, and thus they'll perform their tasks more efficiently and with less fatigue accumulation.
5. Better in-and-out: Improving strength will enhance self-confidence and self-esteem and make a woman feel sexier and sleeker.

Resistance training also helps your brain. It builds your bones. It makes you strong. It keeps older folks from looking and feeling, well, old.

So put away your 3lb weights, roll up your yoga mats, hide your "AB-BLAST-TONE-FIRMING CARDIO-DANCE-ZONE" dvds, and go pick up something heavy.

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Coming soon: beginner routines for home, beginner routines for the gym
Recommended reading in the mean time: Starting Strength wiki, Stronglifts 5x5, Stumptuous