Women and Crossfit
Full article entitled: Sex, Appearance, and Training. By Mark Rippetoe. Full article can be found in the May 2007 Crossfit Journal entitled.
To quote a famous fitness author, "Women are not a special population. They are half of the population." But they respond to heavy physical stress differently than the other half of the population. Despite this fact, women get the best results when they train for performance, because even though there are differences between men's and women's response to training, there is no difference in the quality of the exercise needed to produce the stress that causes adaptation. In other words, silly bullshit in the gym is silly bullshit, for both sexes.
The women's "fitness" industry has been around a long time. "Figure salons" were common in the 1960s, and my first job in the industry in 1977 was at a club that alternated hours for men and women. We had separate staff, with the women's shift working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and the men's staff basically working Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, which pretty much precluded any 3-on/1-off training. But the women didn't train anyway. They exercised, toned, firmed, and sculpted. They were required by the club to train in tights (which the club sold), and sweating was strongly discouraged because exercising this hard was 1) apt to build bulky muscles, 2) caused the exerciser to make too much noise and that, combined with the sweat, might 3) intimidate the other ladies.
At the time the men's "program" wasn't much better, but training hard was a matter of pride in the Nautilus room and our members suffered from no lack of effort or exertion; rather they were the victims of our staff's inexperience and ignorance of exercise science. The women's program suffered from an entirely different problem: the perception that women were absolutely, inherently, and permanently different from men, to the extent that any program of physical exercise had to be different from men's programs, right down to the molecular level. Both suffered from an emphasis on appearance (typically "masculine" or conventionally "feminine") rather then performance.
Men and women do in fact respond differently to training, but not in the ways that the
industry, the media, and popular culture have presented as fact. Furthermore, and quite importantly, both the real, actual differences and the ridiculous, supposed differences between men and women have created a lot of the aforementioned silly bullshit in the gym, the net effect of which has had a particularly detrimental effect on women's training.
Women's collegiate and professional athletics and its participants have for many years held the answers to the questions most women ask about exercise, answers that have gone fastidiously ignored by the figure salon industry. The results, in terms of both performance and aesthetics, admired by the vast majority of women had been and continue to be routinely produced by advanced athletics programs, yet "body sculpting" sessions--low-intensity machine-based circuit training classes, the 1980s equivalent of most modern Pilates and yoga classes--were the approach sold to the public. Now, as then, "easier" is easier to sell.
The fact is that aesthetics are best obtained from training for performance. In both architecture and human beauty, form follows function. Always and everywhere, the human body has a certain appearance when it performs at a high level, and depending on the nature of that high-level performance, this appearance is usually regarded as aesthetically pleasing, for reasons that are DNA-level deep. The training through which high-level performance is obtained is the only reliable way to obtain these aesthetics, and the only exceptions to this method of obtaining them are the occasional genetically-gifted freaks--people who look like they train when they were just born lucky. As a general rule, if you want to look like a lean athlete--the standard that most active people strive to emulate--you have to train like an athlete, and most people lack the "sand" for that.
Despite this unfortunate truth (most truths seems to fall into this category), the fitness industry continues to sell aesthetics first, as though it is independent of performance. The focus is always on appearance, as though that can actually be trained for. Think about it: how many leg extensions do you do, and with what weight, to make your quads just look better? I know how to make your squat stronger, but how do you program Bun Blaster sets and reps for a tight ass? Exactly how does one go about obtaining a great glute/ham tie-in? I may be able to double your pull-ups in a month, but I don't know how to give your back that V-shape everyone craves without increasing your pull-ups. Every single aspect of programming for resistance training that works at all does so because it increases some aspect of performance, and appearance is a side-effect of performance. Appearance can't change unless performance does, and the performance changes are what we quantify and what we program. We pretty much know how to improve that, but the industry is based on the fiction that appropriate training proceeds from an assessment of aesthetics. Your appearance when fit is almost entirely a function of your genetics, which are expressed at their best only when your training is at its highest level, and this level is only obtainable from a program based on an improvement in your performance in the gym. And the best improvements in the gym occur when participating in a program that looks more like performance athletics--the kind of training done by competitive athletes--than one that looks like waving your arms and legs around on a machine or slowly rolling around on the floor.
Read the rest of this article in the May 2007 issue of the Crossfit Journal.
To quote a famous fitness author, "Women are not a special population. They are half of the population." But they respond to heavy physical stress differently than the other half of the population. Despite this fact, women get the best results when they train for performance, because even though there are differences between men's and women's response to training, there is no difference in the quality of the exercise needed to produce the stress that causes adaptation. In other words, silly bullshit in the gym is silly bullshit, for both sexes.
The women's "fitness" industry has been around a long time. "Figure salons" were common in the 1960s, and my first job in the industry in 1977 was at a club that alternated hours for men and women. We had separate staff, with the women's shift working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and the men's staff basically working Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, which pretty much precluded any 3-on/1-off training. But the women didn't train anyway. They exercised, toned, firmed, and sculpted. They were required by the club to train in tights (which the club sold), and sweating was strongly discouraged because exercising this hard was 1) apt to build bulky muscles, 2) caused the exerciser to make too much noise and that, combined with the sweat, might 3) intimidate the other ladies.At the time the men's "program" wasn't much better, but training hard was a matter of pride in the Nautilus room and our members suffered from no lack of effort or exertion; rather they were the victims of our staff's inexperience and ignorance of exercise science. The women's program suffered from an entirely different problem: the perception that women were absolutely, inherently, and permanently different from men, to the extent that any program of physical exercise had to be different from men's programs, right down to the molecular level. Both suffered from an emphasis on appearance (typically "masculine" or conventionally "feminine") rather then performance.
Men and women do in fact respond differently to training, but not in the ways that the
industry, the media, and popular culture have presented as fact. Furthermore, and quite importantly, both the real, actual differences and the ridiculous, supposed differences between men and women have created a lot of the aforementioned silly bullshit in the gym, the net effect of which has had a particularly detrimental effect on women's training.Women's collegiate and professional athletics and its participants have for many years held the answers to the questions most women ask about exercise, answers that have gone fastidiously ignored by the figure salon industry. The results, in terms of both performance and aesthetics, admired by the vast majority of women had been and continue to be routinely produced by advanced athletics programs, yet "body sculpting" sessions--low-intensity machine-based circuit training classes, the 1980s equivalent of most modern Pilates and yoga classes--were the approach sold to the public. Now, as then, "easier" is easier to sell.
The fact is that aesthetics are best obtained from training for performance. In both architecture and human beauty, form follows function. Always and everywhere, the human body has a certain appearance when it performs at a high level, and depending on the nature of that high-level performance, this appearance is usually regarded as aesthetically pleasing, for reasons that are DNA-level deep. The training through which high-level performance is obtained is the only reliable way to obtain these aesthetics, and the only exceptions to this method of obtaining them are the occasional genetically-gifted freaks--people who look like they train when they were just born lucky. As a general rule, if you want to look like a lean athlete--the standard that most active people strive to emulate--you have to train like an athlete, and most people lack the "sand" for that.
Despite this unfortunate truth (most truths seems to fall into this category), the fitness industry continues to sell aesthetics first, as though it is independent of performance. The focus is always on appearance, as though that can actually be trained for. Think about it: how many leg extensions do you do, and with what weight, to make your quads just look better? I know how to make your squat stronger, but how do you program Bun Blaster sets and reps for a tight ass? Exactly how does one go about obtaining a great glute/ham tie-in? I may be able to double your pull-ups in a month, but I don't know how to give your back that V-shape everyone craves without increasing your pull-ups. Every single aspect of programming for resistance training that works at all does so because it increases some aspect of performance, and appearance is a side-effect of performance. Appearance can't change unless performance does, and the performance changes are what we quantify and what we program. We pretty much know how to improve that, but the industry is based on the fiction that appropriate training proceeds from an assessment of aesthetics. Your appearance when fit is almost entirely a function of your genetics, which are expressed at their best only when your training is at its highest level, and this level is only obtainable from a program based on an improvement in your performance in the gym. And the best improvements in the gym occur when participating in a program that looks more like performance athletics--the kind of training done by competitive athletes--than one that looks like waving your arms and legs around on a machine or slowly rolling around on the floor.
Read the rest of this article in the May 2007 issue of the Crossfit Journal.