Benefits of Working for Strength


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Over the last decade, the women’s fitness industry has begun to change slowly but steadily. As a culture, we’re still not entirely comfortable with women choosing to enlarge rather than shrink their bodies. Women’s bodybuilding remains a form of demonstration sport, partly due to a fundamental lack of understanding of “Why?” Why Does a woman feel compelled to grow up this much? But, perhaps most strongly, there are signs of progress as evidenced by the rise of CrossFit, the popular, hard-core strength-building regimen whose fans are almost 50 percent women.

Journalist JC Herz, in his article titled “Learning to Breathe to Breathe: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness”, argues that when women first come to CrossFit gyms, the world will one day be at least as big – “torn” – . more experienced female lifters. “But then two months pass and these women decide they want to climb a tightrope or lift their body weight dead.” And eventually, “their bodies become a byproduct of what they’re capable of.”

Shannon Kim Wagner, founder Women’s Power Coalition, a group dedicated to helping members of all gender identities build muscle, described its experience with weight training this way: “Getting a barbell for me meant, for the first time, focusing on my body with nothing to do by shrinking or shrinking myself. Safety from others. “It was a radical feeling to seek in myself instead of seeking approval. Once I decided to stop shrinking in my physical body, I stopped existing for others.”

Today I exercise not only for physical, but also for mental strength. I exercise to feel the high endorphins of success and manage life’s lows. I exercise to remind myself that I can persevere and that I am not alone. Most of the women I know (and like many women I meet across the country) think that regular physical activity is essential for their emotional and physical health. My mom, who is in her early 70s, calls her weekly cardio dance classes “a definite joy.”

Not long ago, when I mentioned my Get Fit girl! An acquaintance on social media sent me the following note: I totally remember Get in Shape, Girl! and can sing the advertising jingle for you. I grew up chubby and overweight in college—precisely because I started dieting in fifth grade. I remember asking for it on my birthday or Christmas, “This is going to be what makes me “normal,” by which I meant “thin.” Of course not. In my late 20s and early 30s, I realized that physical exercise doesn’t have to be punishing.

I now know how lucky I am to live in an era where an increasing number of fitness professionals are selling exercise not as a punishment but as a celebration of what our bodies can do; An age in which women are encouraged to develop power for our own pleasure, not for the pleasure of others. Increasingly, ladies only make.

Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York. This article is adapted from the new book “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World,” a cultural history of female fitness.



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