I ask this, because of a lot of questions regarding working out and building muscle seem to have this theme. It appears as many women are interested in working out as men but are more apprehensive about “getting too big”.
Is it society’s attitudes towards women and what constitutes an attractive healthy appearance (not too muscly and heavy on the super skinny) or negative feedback from guys that are fueling these concerns?
I personally believe the fitness figure women look very healthy and attractive, however their image in the media is overshadowed by the most extreme heavy weight female bodybuilders, who are obviously juicing. I doubt that women who are clean and all natural, should worry too much about gaining too much muscle, simply because the likelihood is diminished by being all natural.
Thought on this?
Tags: Attitudes, Away, Building, from, more, muscle, scaring, society's, women
A lot of the women I’ve known who are worried about getting “too big” aren’t so much worried about not staying slim, but are worried about transforming into a body builder. The predominate image in society is the adult male. Most tests are done on adult males, buildings and cars are engineered to best fit adult males, adult males sell more products on television and in ads, and the basis of understanding about the human body starts with an analysis of the adult male. Because of testosterone, if an adult male works out, his body tends to become larger and more muscled.
There aren’t a lot of resources out there that explicitly explain to women that this won’t happen to them. The only body building images women see are humongous muscled men and humongous muscled women, who have work twice as hard to get the same look as the humongous muscled men because they don’t have large amounts of testosterone to give them a boost like the men do.
Even women’s exercise plans tend to focus more on cardio and flexibility than muscle. Weights are aimed at men or the extremely driven body-building crowd of women who want 3% body fat and abs that look like writhing snakes. There aren’t any ads that show a normal, fit, healthy woman with good muscle build and vivacious curves from a good muscle/fat distribution because that kind of look isn’t very dramatic. I think if more women saw ads like that, they’d be more understanding of what weight lifting REALLY does to a woman’s body and wouldn’t be as turned away by it.
I really wish that more women would come to that understanding. Weight training is so much more fun than ANY cardio exercises I’ve done and women who work out using weights get some really fantastic shape to their bodies!