[Female fat logic] Weight training? No, thanks. I don’t want to be muscly
In our society, weight training for women is seen as something negative. People immediately picture massive female body builders, with huge bulging muscles and broad shoulders, who ‘look like men’. I guess everyone’s seen these kinds of extreme female body builders in the media, and it seems most people consider them to be unattractive.
I think one of the reasons for this is that our ideal of beauty is based on a ‘healthy appearance’ and therefore both being very underweight and being very overweight (irrespective of whether it’s due to fat or muscle mass) is perceived as unattractive by most people. It is a fact that women naturally have less muscle mass than men. The blog Alles Evolution gives the following breakdown of the average physical differences between men and women:
Women, by contrast, naturally have more body fat and more elastic tissue, as their bodies are designed to provide for a baby in the womb. So, unless she intervenes massively with male hormones, a woman will never be able to build up anything near the amount of muscle mass a man is able to gain. It’s biologically impossible. Of course, when it comes to losing weight, that’s a real disadvantage because muscle mass is the only significant way of influencing the body’s resting energy requirement.
Men already have more muscle mass in their ‘raw state’, but they also build up muscle mass more quickly with weight training, giving them a great way to speed up their weight loss.
Women, on the other hand, who are already at a disadvantage, are additionally influenced by societal nonsense advising them to avoid lifting any heavy weights because they might accidentally heft a big dumbbell and wake up the next morning with shoulders like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The truth is, a ‘defined’ figure, with muscles visible beneath your skin but not especially pumped up, is about the maximum women can achieve, even with intensive weight training — unless they resort to other ways of gaining muscle mass. The ‘danger’ of suddenly becoming ‘too muscly’ is so slight as to be negligible. Especially when you think about how much effort serious female body builders have to invest in their bodies.
But women are still encouraged to take up more ‘feminine’ sports like those based on endurance rather than strength, or like aerobics without weights. There’s nothing wrong with those sports, but they do little or nothing to stop the body looking ‘flabby’ (unless the woman has very little fatty tissue and the smaller muscles are visible) or to address the fact that even quite light women have a relatively large amount of body fat and not much muscle mass.
Another little-known fact is that that common female bugbear, cellulite, isn’t just a tissue problem, but also a muscle problem. When muscles atrophy, the tissue on top of the muscle becomes detached and dimples in an unattractive way. Cellulite isn’t an unavoidable fate for women as they get older. It’s a result of flabby muscles and too much fatty tissue, and it’s reversible — at least to some extent.
What’s sad is that this particular ideal is held up as desirable — a taut, defined, slim body — but at the same time, women are discouraged from doing what’s necessary to attain that ideal, i.e., building muscle mass. Instead, they’re encouraged to work senselessly for it and spend hours running on a treadmill or cycling on an exercise bike with low resistance (so that their thighs don’t get too strong). I see a lot of these kinds of women at the gym, who then move on to the leg press where they ‘work’ with 30-kilo weights. Pressing such a low weight is so unchallenging that getting up from the leg press afterwards actually provides more training. It’s why a lot of women start to get frustrated by the fact that they see no difference in their bodies, even though they’re going to the gym several times a week.
The worst-case scenario with this kind of work-out is that the woman will then fall prey to the mistake described elsewhere in this book: she will overestimate the number of calories she’s burned during a training session, will eat accordingly, and as a result her fat will increase rather than decreasing —meanwhile, she will mistakenly conclude that after the first month of training those extra two kilos stem from ‘building up muscles’.
Weight training is advisable not just because it’s good for your appearance and a good way to lose weight, but also because it improves your general feelings about your body. To judge from my own experience at least, it boosts self-confidence because it makes day-to-day tasks easier to perform without help. While we were doing up our old house, I was always frustrated at having to wait for hours for my husband to turn up because I wasn’t strong enough to do some jobs myself. Now I’m able to do a lot of those things by myself, and that independence is liberating.
The improvement weight training makes to body posture also helps to boost your self-confidence. The muscle mass built up by weight training can help you to have a more upright posture, and that, in turn, has a positive influence on your mood and general attitude. According to Cuddy (2012), body posture has a big influence on self-confidence. For example, people are far more successful in job interviews when they spend a few minutes beforehand consciously standing, or sitting up, as straight and as confidently as possible.
And, yes, weight training is also very good for your health. If you’re beginning to think I sound like a fanatical supporter of weight training, you might be right. I do think weight training is extremely useful — for both genders, of course. I’ve addressed this chapter to women specifically, because I’ve never heard a man express a fear of becoming ‘too muscly’.
I had a memorable experience of this societal nonsense with someone who really should have known better: the physiotherapist who treated me after my knee operation. He strongly recommended to me that I should have a second knee operation because apparently I would never be able to achieve the build-up of muscle that was recommended by the orthopaedic surgeon in order to stabilise the joint. The physiotherapist’s words were something like, ‘That would involve having to do weight training at least twice a week — and wouldn’t you rather look good?’
If patients are discouraged in this way, rather than being encouraged to at least give it a try, it’s hardly surprising that the success rate is correspondingly low. It’s like me telling one of my psychotherapy clients who’s afraid to leave the house because of his agoraphobia to find some good food-delivery services rather than work on his fears.
After my prescribed six sessions with that physiotherapist were up, I took my next prescription to a difference practice where there was a strong focus on muscle-building exercises. The physiotherapist there was the one I became friends with and whom I now meet up with regularly so that we can train together as friends.
That experience brought home to me again the extent to which lack of activity has become the norm in our society. Half an hour’s weight training three times a week should be something that is generally encouraged — and not just in order to avoid a second operation.
This demotivating attitude to physical exercise is probably not purely a women’s problem. Overweight people in general are often told that there’s no chance of them ever getting properly fit. The only difference is that at least men have an ideal to strive for, whereas women are told that it’s not only impossible to achieve, but also undesirable.