I have an over seventy, female client who owns three kettlebells that she keeps in her building’s gym. They weigh thirty-five, forty-five, and sixty-five pounds. So when one of her fellow tenants complained in a board meeting that the kettlebells in the gym are too heavy and that when buying weights the board should, “think about the women in the building,” my client couldn’t help but give a subtle—and maybe a little self-satisfied—smirk.
The fact that my client is over seventy and working out is great, but what’s even better is that she is a woman and doing it with weights that are heavier than her handbag. That’s worth commending, because in spite of the ‘girls gone strong’, ‘strong is the new thin’, ‘for cardio I lift weights faster’ movements that have thankfully begun to crop up in more recent years, there is still a prevalent societal expectation that women lift tiny weights. It’s just a sticky message.
What Society Expects From Women And Weights
Obviously, the jumping off point for our attitudes about women and weights are the standard stereotypes that describe women as the weaker, fairer, ‘delicate flower’ sex. In spite of the fact that women are asserting themselves more and more in politics, in business, even in the world of television superheroes—I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a Supergirl fan—this basic stereotype is still helping to keep the one, two, three, and five pound weights in the gym. (The cell phone people lug with them is almost that heavy.) If the ‘weak sex’ stereotype were the only thing behind this stubborn norm, though, it might go out the window with the ideas that women can’t be leaders or business people or superheroes, but it isn’t. There are other subtler, or maybe not so subtle, attitudes helping to shape our gym behavior.
For starters, a lot of our attitudes about strength are tied to our ideas about how people should look. The general consensus as of this moment is that men should be muscular and women should be thin. Thanks to this notion, the health and fitness world sends two different messages, one for the men who are told to ‘bulk-up’ and one for the women who are told to ‘tone up.’1 This messaging already creates an artificial dichotomy around weight training. Since ‘toning’ is supposedly different from ‘bulking’, women must therefore lift differently than men, which ends up roughly translating into: men lift heavy weights and women lift tiny weights ten-thousand times.
Connected to the looks issue is the related factor of gender roles. Societies assign roles to individuals, not infrequently through the use of stereotypes, and those stereotypes can sometimes clash with reality. In the case of female athletes, when the aesthetics don’t line up with societal standards about what it means to be beautiful or feminine, even when those same aesthetics are a benefit to performance, people take notice. Witness the infamous moment in which Serena Williams was asked whether she was intimidated by Maria Sharapova’s ‘super-model good looks.’ Whatever the intentions of the question, it is a pretty spot on example of a double-standard. Muscular and powerful bodies are rarely seen as a negative for men. On the contrary, they are usually viewed as highly intimidating. Female athletes with the same characteristics are seen as somehow at a disadvantage.
What Women Miss Out On When They Skip The Heavy Weights
With some of the pertinent social angles covered, let’s talk a bit about the physiological aspect. This is where things get very interesting, because the social and the physiological pieces intersect in a comically self-defeating way. First, these misconceptions are causing us to totally misapply the very word ‘strength.’ Strength is defined, generally, as how much force you can produce against resistance.2 The thing about force production is that it’s not cumulative. Lifting a five pound weight one hundred times does not equal the amount of force it takes to lift five-hundred pounds once. In other words, lifting something heavy only a few times and lifting something light many times trains entirely different things. One trains strength, the other endurance. That’s a real issue, because strength is a really important physical attribute. It helps people move better, feel better, boost their metabolisms, build strong bones, and much more. We want everybody to be as strong as they can be. We don’t want half the population to be under-strengthed simply because we’re connecting it to ideas about how they should look.
The problem doesn’t end there, though. There is another ironically self-defeating fact about this situation. The truth is, people do care about how they look, and that’s not a crime. It’s not so much that people can’t want to change their appearance, even if it’s society pressuring them to, it’s just that people need to know when their and society’s expectations are helping them fail rather than succeed. We’ve got that happening here. ‘Toning’, you see, is not a thing. What we all recognize as toned are muscles that are both bigger than average and surrounded by a smaller than average amount of body fat, resulting in a muscle that you can see very clearly with your eye. Achieving a truly ‘toned’ look does not come from lifting tiny weights many times. It actually requires adding some muscles size. Ironically, since women aren’t supposed to lift anything heavy due to gender norms and beauty standards (don’t be bulky), it gets very hard to actually build any muscle. When you combine that with the fact that endless cardio and starvation actually tears existing muscle down, the look becomes even more elusive, requiring ever more drastic measures to achieve it. The diets, the cleanses, the spinning—oh my!
If You’re A Woman, Lift Something Heavy
The bottom line is that this annoyingly persistent idea that women should use tiny little weights comes from stereotypes, societal pressures and norms, and misunderstandings of physiology. Adding insult to injury, a lot of these ideas create a self-defeating feedback loop. Women would like to look toned while at the same time not wanting to build any muscle. It doesn’t work for the vast majority of people and in the meantime, all of the other health benefits that come from building real strength are lost. It doesn’t have to happen. Venture over to the heavy weights.
Related: You’re Not Strong. Not Even Close