Not Just a Man's World

My blog-watch the other week provided a few posts and articles that could be used to encourage female friends to get into weight training.  But so many women still believe the myth that lifting big weights will turn them into muscle-woman. 

This will not build big muscles!

Apart from the fact that this is wrong (even men struggle to get the sort of muscles that women seem to think they will sprout the first time they pick up something heavy), what was so wrong with Wonder Woman?  She had a lovely figure, though I might pass on the outfits…

When I do meet women who train with weights one of the first questions that gets exchanged is: “What got you started?”  Men hardly ever ask each other this question but because women who lift are an oddity rather than the norm we feel compelled to ask (or perhaps it’s just natural female curiosity).

“My husband/partner/boyfriend lifted weights and got me into it”

This is the answer I hear most often.  However, this answer also implies a lot about the character of the person you are speaking to.  It suggests to me that they’ve got an open mind and a willingness to challenge the status quo (or a desire to stand out from the crowd of men in the gym).

“I wanted to improve my figure”

These are often the blessed few who wanted to improve their figure and, either accidentally or after recommendation and research, found themselves with a personal coach who knew what they were talking about.

That or they did some proper research into exercise and fitness and found out the truth.

So why did I start weight training?

Like everything in life I never take the obvious route and a recent post by Gubernatrix brought back memories of why I first got into it.

We had started cycling a lot more and one day I found myself driving along a country lane in the opposite direction to the local veterans cycle club.  As twenty old gentlemen streamed past, some with cycle helmets askew that had been fitted when they still had hair and others who had clearly removed their teeth for the bike ride, I explained to Chris, my partner, that I would also like to be able to cycle to the end of my life.

The beauty of cycling is that it is very low impact for the body, so it is a sport that you can continue to excel at to a much older age.  A good example would be Jeannie Longo, the French racing cyclist who is still competing in big races at the age of 51 and who even came fourth in the Women’s Time Trial at the Beijing Olympics last year.  How’s that for inspirational?

My concern was that if I fell off my bike the brittle bones of old age would break and I would be incapacitated for a month or two while they healed, losing valuable fitness.

Getting started

We quickly established, thanks to the internet, that the best way to avoid osteoporosis was to build up and maintain bone density.  Weight-bearing exercise, especially the sorts of things Chris was doing in our garage “gym” (at the time just a single bar and pile of weights) was going to be the best way to do it.

I don’t remember giving much consideration to whether I would build up big muscles.  The important thing was that this would be my key to an active old age.  So we drew up a very basic program and off I went.

My first training session was a Thursday evening after work and we tried a bit of everything, establishing along the way that I:

• was incredibly weak – I could only overhead press an empty bar; and
• had the hip mobility of a tree – I was tucking at the half-squat position and could forget deadlifting anything without putting it on blocks first.

Falling at the first hurdle

The following Saturday I learnt the importance of my new sport. 

I was out on my bike when I was run off the road by a car-driver.  At the time I had just set off up a hill after a break and was going at 10mph or less.  I saved the fall on my open palms and the impact went straight up both forearms.  I was left with a fracture in my right elbow and a partial fracture in the left elbow.

If anyone was in need of a bit more bone density, it was me.  Two years earlier, Chris had been hit by a van when cycling at full speed in London, flown over a parked car and landed in the road in front of it.  He’d walked away with nothing more than bruising.  If Chris could survive that unscathed and here was me with two fractures after a tiny fall then there was a lot of work to do.

After a few weeks of being fed, washed and dressed I had the use of my left arm back and got straight into one-arm deadlifts, single-arm dumbbell squats and one-arm military presses (amongst other things.  Unusually, I had the opportunity to really start my training from nothing – I could barely lift a 10kg dumbbell after the lay-off.

So what got you started?  Were you inspired by a bunch of toothless veterans too?

Related posts:

1. Weight training women
2. Adherence to a strength training intervention in adult women
3. Influence of moderately intense strength training on flexibility in sedentary young women
4. New Year, fresh start