Get Her In The Gym

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I’ve always wanted to help get women in the gym and restructure their concept of “optimal body image”. I’ve written an entire series titled “Getting Girls to Train” about it. At the same time, we all agreed in “The Fat Epidemic” that while we despise excuses that prevent someone from being healthy, we will also be supportive of folks who are battling back from inactivity and poor dietary choices.

Today my friend Shana Alverson of CrossFit East Decatur (who is a 5 time CrossFit Games competitor and quite strong) put up a link showing the progress of one of her clients. Myesha has been consistently working out at CFED since 2011. She has completely altered her diet and trains at CFED at least 4 times a week. She has lost 45 pounds, dropped from a 16 to 8 in pants sized, and has gotten much stronger.

Say what you will about CrossFit, but say it can be effective. Aside from hitting the gym, you may also consider taking protein powder to help you get in good shape.

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My friend Jeremy, owner of CrossFit Annandale, was talking to a new client in June. The girl said, “Isn’t CrossFit like a cult or something?” Jeremy, who is primarily a lifter (and has a cool barbell club class), smiled and said, “But isn’t it a good cult? What’s wrong with a group of people who like to exercise and eat healthy?” The girl was back the next day. The same thing happens with Jacob Tsypkin of CrossFit Monterey, Ruth and Sean at CrossFit Intrepid, all the folks at Amarillo Strength and Conditioning, and countless other places. Of course CrossFit can get weird, but Jeremy, Shana, and these other owners keep it real at their facilities.

These gym owners end up proving their worth with their personality and results. But more importantly, they provide a gateway. Women go to these facilities intimidated, but willing to see what it’s all about. Jeremy’s smile and Shana’s personality assure them that they’ll have a good time, and they do! It gets folks in the gym.

I don’t know if Myesha has heard of this site or cares about lifting (though she deadlifts around 360), but joining CFED provided the opportunity to a) improve her health, b) challenge herself, and c) provide the potential for getting into cool things like strongman, highland games, Olympic weightlifting, or powerlifting. I know that Jeremy has taken many people, including women, to strongman meets. One of the strongman compeitors is named Mary, who is 48 and squats 300 pounds! It all started because a woman decided to make the jump from “interested” to “trainee”.

This isn’t a post to praise CrossFit, but an emphasis on doing what we can in the grand scheme of getting women to train. Whether it’s in a garage, a fitness facility, or a CrossFit gym, helping a woman start that process of training — not just working out, but training — is the first step. At the very least it could help her get healthy, but she could turn into an example of progress like Myesha or fierce competitors like all of the girls that post on this website (and yes, you’re still girls, so plbtttttt).

Lifters and serious performance trainees aren’t going to sprout out of the air. The seed must be planted, cultivated, and developed (this is not a metaphor for the horizontal rambas). Use the popularity of CrossFit, the Olympics, or professional sports. Help your female friends by providing a gateway into the gym. It will expose them to all of the fun stuff. And who knows? They might end up loving it more than you.

40 thoughts on “Get Her In The Gym”

  1. i love how you tip-toe on egg shells whenever you mention crossfit. i think you should just have more confidence when talking about it. I think by now your readers will understand that you’re referring to the Crossfitters that are doing shit right and not the idiots, which are out there in every area of fitness. Like the tools wearing shiny leather (slippery) gloves and false-gripping their bench presses without a spot in the Y while “bodybuilding”, or the tool like me who lifts jelly dick weights in some pseudo-powerlifting-weightlifting hybrid program alone in his garage and never competes at anything.

    • I agree. Everytime Crossfit gets mentioned in an article here, I know I have a paragraph of fence sitting to skip through. It was made clear how you feel in the article you wrote on Crossfit. It does good for a lot of people and then there are jelly dick dipshits who drink the Kool-Aid, just like in bodybuilding, powerlifting, olympic lifting, etc.

    • disagree.
      Former 1000$ tshirt owner/kool-aid drinker here. Managed a few websites for CF owners. Have a fair bit of exposure to that silliness from marketing and business aspects. Every gym i have had involvement with has focused on CONSTANTLY getting new people in the door (and a very low retainment rate). Some top gyms in AU, not 1 ever hit critical mass.
      Most of the males I used to CF with dont do it anymore. 99% of the females dont do it anymore. If CF is a gateway, or even seen as a gateway, it needs a fucking long preamble because it is full of eggshells.

      And its not just bad programming, it has almost nothing to do with programming. Is there really a smart way to program 30 muscleups for time? Tap and go deadlifts? bench press on a ghd? or any of the other stupid shit they do?
      Wait lets just program 75 snatches “intelligently”? Loosen up those shoulders with some butterfly kips first so you dont hurt yourself.

      No such way to have smart programming with those tools at your disposal.

      I realise this is criticism without an answer or alternative. Getting women (and everyone) into a decent gym that is not a globo gym or a crossfit is going to be hard. It really is easier when the partners are in there.

      • All of those ARE bad programming, not “tools” to use within programming. I haven’t ever done crossfit, so I can’t speak authoritatively, but everything I hear is that the the good ones don’t follow the mainsite programming at all. CFFB and others are where you have to look for good programming. The best coaches will have their own. The truly great will advise you to follow custom programming.

      • are those 99% of females who used to crossfit and now aren’t doing anything else? the males? i ask b/c i crossfitted for a year but quickly found it to be ridiculous (all the things you mention and more! my personal soapbox is high rep heavy deadlifts). however, crossfit introduced me to lifting, which i’m still doing 2 years after quitting crossfit. and i’m doing it at the same crossfit gym – because my gym is great and the community is a big part of why i keep going back.

        i don’t think the community aspect of training can be ignored (and many crossfits do this *really* well). you kind of get at by saying it’s easier to get women into the gym if their partners are there – but it’s also easier when their friends are there, or if they can easily make friends once they get there.

      • are those 99% of females who used to crossfit and now aren’t doing anything else? the males? i ask b/c i crossfitted for a year but quickly found it to be ridiculous (all the things you mention and more! my personal soapbox is high rep heavy deadlifts). however, crossfit introduced me to lifting, which i’m still doing 2 years after quitting crossfit. and i’m doing it at the same crossfit gym – because my gym is great and the community is a big part of why i keep going back.

        i don’t think the community aspect of training can be ignored (and many crossfits do this *really* well). you kind of get at by saying it’s easier to get women into the gym if their partners are there – but it’s also easier when their friends are there, or if they can easily make friends once they get there.

    • You guys make good points, but I do want to make it clear every time that I mention them that there are good and bad parts of CrossFit. This site gets new readers all of the time, so not all of them will have seen past posts on the issue. If you’ve read the site for a while or emerged from CrossFit, you know there are positives and negatives. Obviously I don’t mind it and it’s good for a lot of purposes, but it also depends on how it’s implemented. The way I write about it reflects how I feel about it. I’d rather highlight the people that do it well then give an over sweeping thumbs up or down.

  2. I’ve been lifting for a year and while I got stronger, I didn’t have any dramatic change in my looks – mostly because I was not overweight nor skinny, so the fat’s very very slowly is being replaced by muscle. And I didn’t eat too many surplus calories (was pretty much doing Leangains recomp) so my strength gains were pretty slow. Right now I decided to just go ahead and eat surplus calories – but I’m just getting fat in the middle. I don’t know how to find a good middle ground where I can actually make good progress in the gym without gaining a ton of fat in my mid-section

        • mid section fat is usually cortisol related, (google cortisol pouch) so stress and sleep (or too much coffee) is first place to look. Sometimes IF doesnt work for people, Mark Sisson had a whole writeup on why it may not be good for females especially.

          You may also have blood sugar/insulin issues. Best way is a blood sugar monitor, take readings 1 hr after eating.

          Short intense workouts (sprints best) may help your insulin receptors better manage this.

          Finally, hormones, birth control, my gf’s body shape changes throughout the month depending on her cycle. For 1 week a month i get bigger boobies to play with!

          • Hmmm…. I get enough sleep, am not on hormonal birth control (I was definitely fat when I was), blood sugar levels are fine. I do drink alot of coffee but find it hard to believe that would be it. How much coffee is really too much coffee?

              • get a hormonal workup to know if its cortisol or adrenal fatigue which caffeine can cause.

                how much is too much? who knows. Im not going to pretend too. I do know that its relative, eg if it takes you 2 cups in the morn to just get “normal” thats a lot less stress on the body than someone who doesnt drink coffee and all of a sudden has 2 cups.

                • I’ll second the possibility of insulin issues, even if you think you eat well. Fructose, for example can be problematic.

                  And if there is a high frequency of high intensity workouts (a la CF), plus an over abundance of coffee (I’d say more than 1.5 mugs a day), then it’s not surprising to see a hormonal irritation (summed up as ‘adrenal fatigue’).

                  • So let’s say I possibly do have insulin issues – what then?

                    Since I’m lifting only 3x week (No crossfit , no cardio), can I still have all my coffee? :)

                    • So I just went out and ate a bunch of garbage to test my blood sugar afterwards. A beer, hot wings, a burger with cheddar, guacamole, and some fried onions. At about 90 mins, blood sugar was 95, and at 120 mins, it’s at 107. (didn’t make it in home to test in 60 mins) I’ll test again in a bit but so far after 2 hours it’s not outside the normal range.

    • i was having the same problem, but i’ve recently started doing some intermittent fasting and it seems to be helping. i haven’t changed anything else about my diet or training but i notice less belly fat. i haven’t lost weight, but i am still getting stronger. i try to do 1 24 hour fast per week, and 14 hour fasts each day (i stop eating at night by 8pm and i don’t start eating until 10am the next day). here’s a pretty good primer on different kinds of IF: http://www.niashanks.com/2011/08/three-methods-of-intermittent-fasting/

      also (i guess this merits mentioning) within the past 4 months i’ve focused on going to sleep at the same time every night which has really helped my sleep quality. i’m also managing stress better, so it’s entirely possible that sleep or stress impacted the stubborn belly fat instead of (or in conjunction with) the IF.

        • yeah i had been doing the 14-16 hour fast for the past 6 months, i really only noticed the belly fat start to dissipate when i added in 1x weekly 24 hour fasts (about 1.5 months ago). ymmv.

          • p.s. i found this resource really awesome (especially krista scott-dixon’s contributions throughout) so i thought i’d share: http://www.precisionnutrition.com/intermittent-fasting

            i am also realizing that i have become LESS obsessed about “eating healthy” over the past few months – if i want some potato salad with actual potatoes instead of sweet potatoes, i have some. if i want yogurt with some maple syrup and granola, i have some. i think this (for me) has resulted in less stress around diet/exercise, which in turn, has caused me to feel better overall and possibly contributed to losing the stubborn belly fat. maybe instead of focusing on more things to do (i.e. potentially add stress to your nutrition), you might want to try letting go. the 24 hour fasts helped me do this – it made me realize that hunger won’t kill me, and that “bad” food choices every now and then won’t, either. very possibly not applicable to you, so ignore as you see fit! good luck!

  3. I always argue that crossfit gyms come down to the coaching but that being said I have a friend that opened Crossfit Athletic Group and the clientele is predominantly woman. I think this occurs because of the competitive environment combined with their first exposure to athletic training. Yes, some of the athletes come from a competitive background and have experienced athletic training but others come from that carpeted area of the gym with the whirling treadmills and stairmasters and are laden with intrepidation because of the knuckleheads that populate most gyms or because of the social atmosphere that celebrates skinny celebrities. Crossfit opens the door to these woman and offers them another avenue of expression.

    Again the caveat is that bad programming can ruin anybody but I have seen some horrible trainers at those mega-gyms with their clip-bored looks and their 1-armed half-squat to a press on the cable machine that do just as much harm if not more. Crossfit is a gateway fitness program for many people, look at jocelyn forrest over at Catalyst.

  4. Justin,

    Thanks for posting this. I will tell you that getting women to at least think about powerlifting/oly lifting isn’t hard, but it does require persistence. I think one thing that keeps women from moving toward a strength-specific training program is that they tend to be “blinded” by a very calculated PR campaign that focuses just on nutrition and intense exercise. Now that is not so say we should negate either of those things because they are very important, but I will say that that third leg–strength training/weightlifting–is often missing from the table. I think its very hard to get women to consider a different fitness lifestyle when they are bombarded with celebrity endorsements and “trainers to the stars” that tell you that their program will make you lose 30 pounds in a few weeks and drop two jean sizes just by sending in three easy payments of $19.99.

    The programs that you and others advocate need a good PR/marketing campaign. It doesn’t need to be cheesy and pander to women, but doing things like documenting weight loss, posting before and after photos, taking on female clients as “pro-bono” cases and transforming their bodies, and just merely getting your female clients to take to social media via Youtube, Facebook and Twitter to get in touch with other women would provide a start to getting your message out.

    We can see this with the rise in the bikini division at the NPC/IFBB bodybuilding divisions. For what its worth, these competitions have gotten a lot of women who would otherwise sit on the couch, get up and get in shape. I often read about women who used to be out-of-shape soccer moms who have now become the “hot, sexy mom.” Does it come off a bit silly? You could say so. But these women who used to pick up 10 lb weights and take step classes, are now partaking in split-training programs, eating clean and accurately identifying their traps, quads and biceps.

    In regards to black women like myself and Myesha, I would say that you are going to have to make us aware of powerlifitng/oly lifting because we simply don’t know about it. Not to make this a racial debate, but to be honest when I see videos on powerlifting, I see a lot of white males. It’s not a bad thing, it just seems that these programs are naturally white male dominated. All that means is that black people frankly haven’t heard of this type of training. I see this everyday at my gym. Most black people do traditional weightlifting, not the strength program you espouse. Now I do see a lot of black people increasingly getting into Crossfit; so that could be a gateway to move these people toward Olympic style weightlifting/powerlifting.

    Sorry for the long post. Thanks!

    • Kelly, you’re dead on about how so often, we don’t think it’s possible to do something until we see other people like us doing it. It’s as if it gives folks permission to jump in and start, you know?

      • True. I feel like women exhibit a group mentality when it comes to fitness, much like going to the bathroom together, lol! Strength in numbers I guess. But I really think the powerlifting/oly lifting community could use this to their advantage to get large groups of women to try a different fitness program. I think women sincerely like camaraderie and feeding off each others energy, and they generally gravitate toward teamwork. That groupwork brings about success.

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  6. Last year I got my then-fiance, now-wife to go from doing silly bullshit laden areobics videos to strength/powerlifting. It really wasn’t hard and didn’t take any effort on my part. All it took was her seeing the change in my body and performance from consistent barbell trahing. I talked to her about what I was doing in the gym without telling her she should do it, but I also said things like “this is why this is the most effective way to train, etc.” Eventually she got curious and started asking me questions. Then I competeed at my first meet and she saw other women lifting without looking like freaks. Then I sent her a few 70sBig articles about how lifting weights won’t make women look like those nasty freaks in the checkout line at the grocery store. Then I pointed out that if it were so easy to get huge muscles from lifting, I would have huge muscles. Then she tried lifting for a couple weeks and was amazed at how quickly she improved. That’s all it took. It’s not much different than convincing a guy to lift, you just have to point to different examples of outcomes (i.e. the frail and osteoporosis failure that is Gwenyth Paltro instead of Arnold).

  8. According to my experience I will need help to get my wife into the gym.

    For 4 years my wife refused to let me cook fish, then a friend took her to a traditional Chinese acupuncturist in Markam. This woman offhandedly said she should be eating more fish, now it’s a staple in our house.

    Anyone of the Asian persuasion want to tell my wife to train for me? I’d be eternally grateful.

  9. I myself have not been overly successful in getting women to start training. However, have been successful in getting those women who already train to want to reach their strength potential.

    For me, it was having a positive male influence (my daddy) to get me to train.

    Way to be a role model for other women ladies!

    Any advice on how to get my husband to lift weights would be great.

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